[...] In the first of the unpublished scenes for TPK, we can read: "The lives of most people are small tight pallid and sad, more to be mourned than their deaths" (551)
[...]

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.

[...] For Watts, the chief value of Zen is that it presents the inability to control one's thoughts as proof of the fundamentally untenable distinction between intentional and unintentional acts--a recognition that gives way to a nondualistic vision of the self as fundamentally empty and interdependent with the world. By this reading, if Neal could only question his responsibility for the thoughts that bubble up inside him, the opposition he creates between "fraudulence" and "genuineness" would dissolve of its own accord, exposing the self as a "genuine fake." [...]

[...] For the reader, the significance of Neal's relationship with Master Gurpreet lies in how it anticipates the end of the story. Despite Neal's repeated promises to explain what happens after death, "Good Old Neon" concludes with the revelation that his entire monologue is the fantasy of a "David Wallace" who has imagined, in the literal blink of an eye, Neal's life and death while scanning photos in his high school yearbook. In place of the cosmic language of oneness employed by Neal throughout, the final lines of the story depict Wallace trying to defend these imaginative efforts against his own mocking awareness that "you can't ever truly know what's going on inside somebody else" (181).

Wittgenstein often compares the arbitrariness of the rules of a language to that of the rules of a game, for example, chess: "the purpose of the rules of chess is not to correspond to the essence of chess but to the purpose of the game of chess" [...] We can of course decide, while playing chess, to ignore the existing rules and make up new ones, but then we are not playing chess anymore, and there is a good chance that our opponent does not understand what we are doing (as in the Eschaton game, which ends in a massive fight). [...]

A recurrent situationist theme: the idea of 'the vacation' as a sort of loop of alienation and domination, a symbol of the false promises of modern life, a notion that as CLUB MED--A CHEAP HOLIDAY IN OTHER PEOPLE'S MISERY would become graffiti in Paris in May 1968, and then, it seemed, turned into 'Holidays in the Sun' (21).

[...] In Malle's black-and-white world, animated by the haunting strains of Erik Satie's score, Ronet's Alain Leroy is a lost cause, a narcissist with no hope of growing up. Malle claims,

It wasn't really the suicide that interested me, but how a man reflects on his youth and realizes, in the end, that the beautiful and important part of his life was his youth. From the end of youth until death, we're in constant decline. . . . It's not putting a bullet through our heart or head that matters, but that we have the clarity to realize that something's gone that will never return.

[...] By offering her sexual betrayal of men as possible explanation of her condition, Markson--Wallace is right--converts profound universal suffering into the particularity and niggardliness of secular sin. But by reading her struggle to create self out of language as inherently masculine, Wallace obfuscates for the female narrator all revelation and atonement.

[...] 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.