Having declared that language is ultimately self-referential, Barth has also affirmed that novels themselves, because they do not refer directly to a knowable reality, unavoidably refer instead to other novels. This latter idea directly informs his essay "The Literature of Exhaustion," discussed at greater length in chapter 1. Briefly, Barth argues that all the advances in novelistic technique introduced by the modernist masters—from stream-of-consciousness to spatial form—were originally designed to provide a more accurate access to reality. Now that "reality" is understood to be nothing more than a construct of language. Since all literary conventions have been "exhausted" from overuse and have been undermined by recent theories concerning the relationship between language and the world, the postmodern novel would employ literary conventions self-consciously, thereby warding off the "death of the novel" by writing novels that dramatize that death. The end result would be a fiction that overcomes exhaustion by dramatizing it. Or, as Barth explains, "An artist may paradoxically turn the felt ultimacies of our time into material and means for his work—paradoxically, because by doing so he transcends what had appeared to be his refutation, in the same way that the mystic who transcends finitude is said to be enabled to live, spiritually and physically, in the finite world."'

Metafiction fails because it does not invite us inside but rather makes us stand back and watch the author look at his own reflection; the reader is left outside, alone, and the one thing Mark hates more than anything in the world is "to believe he is alone. Solipsism affects him like Ambrosian metafiction affects him. It's the high siren's song of the wrist's big razor" (303). [...] Wallace's work, conversely, seeks not to depict solipsism but rather to overcome it.

Even more importantly, Hal possesses a quality that Kierkegaard would call "hiddenness" and that most intensely identifies the aesthete. In Kierkegaard's analysis, aesthetes use self-conscious thinking in order to hide from themselves. Likewise, Hal, in hiding his marijuana smoking from his friends and family, also in a sense hides it from himself. As the narrator explains, "Hal likes to get high in secret, but a bigger is secret is that he's as attached to the secrecy as he is to getting high" (49).

He is, in many ways, the fulfillment of Lacan's characteristic dictum, "Le desir de l'Homme, c'est le desire de l'Autre,"which is often translated to read, "Man's desire is for the Other to desire him."

A footnote to the endnote cites a scholarly article titled "Has James O. Incandenza Ever Even Once Produced One Genuinely Original or Unappropriated or Nonderivative Thing?" (990nn), the answer being, "No."

Whereas the postmodern work of his forebears firmly grounds itself in a literary tradition whose grip it feels it cannot shake, Wallace's work demonstrates how the original postmodernists' reliance on self-consciousness, parody, and irony has now become a culture-wide phenomenon: not only is our pop culture equally self-reflexive and self-aware, but so are the people of Wallace's generation, for whom irony is a weapon and a badge of sophistication.

Irony is also a cage the doors of which his work wants to spring. He opens the cage of irony by ironizing it, the same way he uses self-reflexivity to disclose the subtle deceptions at work in literary self-reflexivity. The purpose behind this layered strategy is to create a space outside his work where direct, "single-entendre" principles can breathe and live.