For Wallace, value, kept loose and polysemous, could connect depression's internal discourse

The effect of such forces is, for his characters, enervating

in this essay that led him into the writing of Infinite Jest lies an allegorical ars poetica

My third and most important philosophical guidepost on value is axiology

a textbook petitio principii

attempts a fusion of semiotic, economic, and psychoanalytic systems

Unlike Pynchon, however, Wallace does not wish to dump the legacy of Calvinism; he seeks to build fictions around work and the fervent call to work, an activity he recurrently sees not just in terms of the labor theory of value but, through the lens of Hegel, as the only way of creating a fully viable self.

Hegel's bondsman is a recurrent trope, as is metaphysical slavery in general.

if moral values are, like money, inherited, then so, too, may the morally impoverished of his 1980s generation, new versions of Horatio Alger, go get jobs

The denigration of work, the celebration of efficiency, and the worship of the market are all hallmarks of the ideology that has dominated the United States since the late 1970s, neoliberalism