[...] by using a feminist criticism of Markson's Kate to contemplate problems of the masculine self that exclude (or absorb) the feminine, Wallace appropriates Kate for a meditation on masculinity just as he accuses Markson of appropriating her for his meditation on solipsism. Both acts of appropriation are inflected by the dynamics of desire and power between selves and others, whether male and female or author and character/reader, in the context of language systems. Thus this early essay establishes a set of overlapping concerns that will occupy Wallace's work for his entire writing life: anxiety about heterosexual male assertions of power against women in physical and linguistic male acts of self-definition; and inquiry into language's capacity to communicate ontology of and between men and women, to connect them to each other and to the world, both through and despite sexual desire.