what I call Walace's "skeletal narrative," which involves the undermining and eventual collapse of a surface narrative to reveal the "true" or "real" story, by means of jarring elements planted within the narrative voice itself

This strategy, which I have termed "skeletal narrative," is one whereby Wallace destabilizes a narrative by means of elements embedded within the narrative itself

Skeletal narrative refers to a strategy by which Wallace embeds the seeds of textual and interpretive unraveling within the narrative voice of a story; a narrator (often but not always first-person) begins to tell a story, but through asides of tonal slippage reveals another layer of narrative under the surface, ultimately losing control of the primary narrative vocabulary and confessing or revealing what was hidden.