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In Wallace's work, the antagonism of the man who suffers and the mind which creates becomes the one of the man who is suffering of the feeling of the absence of feelings. I believe that all of David Foster Wallace's prose is about the pain of not feeling to avoid suffering. Or the pain of not feeling to avoid feeling pain. At worst--and this could be a line that Wallace was unable to cross or blur or overcome--it's about the feeling of feeling nothing but for one's self (in other words: narcissism, solipsism). This is what is ultimately at stake in the prose of Wallace.
[...] Literature is a kind of conversation about loneliness. It creates flashes where I--the reader/the writer?--feel human and less alone. Where I feel alone and human. Where I feel inhuman. Feel that I do not feel. Feel the pain of not feeling anything to avoid feeling pain. Fiction is an illusion of a conversation about loneliness that's set up through art by the man who suffers and the mind which creates. The writer, the artist of the self-conscious man. If David Foster Wallace was not the writer who addressed this suffering, if all his work, his skull open on the page, this extraordinary conversation about the loneliness of being in the world and about the difficulty of being human, was not at stake in his work, then Wallace would not have had such an impact on me, I wouldn't have had the feeling that this man was talking into my ear.