Two of Wallace's most famous nonfictional texts, "E Unibus Plu-ram" (1993) and This Is Water (2005), essential to Wallace's manifesto, are sociological to the core. In them, Wallace explores the causes of American social predicaments and submits solutions to them. This indicates the centrality of sociology to his literary project. Part of his diagnosis is that "this is a generation that has an inheritance of absolutely nothing as far as meaningful moral values, and it's our job to make them up, and we're not doing it." Part of his solution is that writers must produce literature that functions "as an anodyne against loneliness," i.e., their duty is to recreate a sense of community.

This is the structure of Wallace's sociology: to define the predicament against which he can theorize writing as therapeutic, corrective, redemptive, and a response to the problems of our time. This is why his sociology constitutes the foundation of his intellectual project. There is no division between Wallace's fiction and nonfiction. His fictional production explicitly refers to its historical, social, political, ethical, and metaphysical context, i.e., to what is addressed in the nonfiction. His work thus constitutes a unity with one clear goal: to find the possibility of salvation from unbearable suffering.

Wallace chose philosophical fiction over philosophy because he saw fiction as the better chance to connect with his readers. He wanted to confront philosophical problems by making them concrete. He counted on fiction's "ability to talk meaningfully to us." Because of this intent, his fiction exists in inextricable relationship with his nonfiction, and his overall work is characterized by consistency in subject matter and variation in perspective, weaving fiction, nonfiction, literature, philosophy, sociology, psychology, and science to try to find the truth and in it salvation from despair.

INTERPRET-ME fictions, thus, teach us that the abstract is concrete, the essence of everyday life. Wallace cites Voltaire's Candide (1759), Gombrowicz's Cosmos (1965), Hesse's The Glass Bead Game (1943), Sartre's Nausea (1948), Camus's The Stranger (1942), Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973), and Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988) as notable examples of this genre, but the point of course is that his fiction belongs to it too. Like Dostoevsky before him, Wallace chose fiction precisely to care for philosophy by manifesting its pervasion of the daily concrete; he chose fiction to make philosophy concrete.
This is precisely the sense in which he quoted Wittgenstein's famous note to Norman Malcolm (from Malcolm's Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, 1988): "what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc. and if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life?"

In "The Empty Plenum," Wallace uses a technique that he will employ throughout his nonfiction: praising artists who actualize the ideals, ends, and features of his own art while never explicitly referring to his own goals or stating that someone represents a model for him. Instead, he lets the obvious and essential conformities between him and the artists he praises arise through this strategy of implication that pervades his nonfiction. Thus, he never writes "artist x produces valuable art because he strives to do y, as I myself try to do." Instead, in essay a, he says that "artist x produces valuable art because he does y;" in essay b, that "the contemporary human predicament needs art that does y;" and in interview c, that "I humbly attempt to do y,'26