While Rorty is explicitly invoked in the title of a later short story--"Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature," taken from Rorty's 1979 book of the same name--Wallace also referred to Stanley Cavell at least once, and his influence on Wallace's work has gained increasing attention in the recent past. Wallace owned and annotated a number of Cavell's books, and his biographer D. T. Max notes that Wallace studied--briefly and somewhat unedifyingly--under Cavell at Harvard. Adam Kelly has noted the importance of Cavell's ideas on language for Wallace's exploration of sincerity in his work. Of particular relevance to our work here is Cavell's invocation of the role of reader in the process of textual production, and his extrapolation from this question to ask "when is writing done?," implicitly averring the constant reproduction by the reader of the process of interpretation. This question is central to Wallace's idea of the process of communication, and his implicit belief (via Wittgenstein) that good fiction should open rather than close, undermine rather than order. [...]