This idea, that by being self-conscious about the way one observes and describes the everyday— the concrete and virtual environments of late 20th-century consumer capitalist society might constitute an ethical process is a long way from Lukács's idea that the only valid kind of fiction is that which recreates in narrative form the movement and action of social change. However, it is an idea that is central to understanding Wallace's descriptions and his fictional project in general. Rather than aiming to change the material conditions of that society (or to show in fiction the action of that change), in Wallace's fiction, the inner drama of the observer and how it relates to external reality actually constitutes those material conditions. Importantly, this is true not only of subjective characters and narrators within Wallace's fiction, but of the reader as well, who must negotiate the complex and richly layered nature of his descriptions.

Thompson addresses Wallace's markings in his copy of Tolstoy's What Is Art? that highlight a passage in which Tolstoy says: "but [art] is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity."3l Thompson writes that this represents what Wallace sought to bring about in his own culture as a way to counteract its "solipsism and loneliness" through art. [...]