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.

notwithstanding his particular idiolect

Wallace finds another way of resisting apocalyptic postmodern anomie

simultaneously aggravating and obviating the distinction between self and other

"liebestod," meaning love-death, here is interesting; the connection of love with death further highlights the notion of death as a consummation

This repeated abnegation of qualification is one of many figurations of a deeply problematic tendency to reject ideas of authority and authorship throughout the nonfiction, in ways that dovetail interestingly with the structural and vocal instability of the fiction.

While lightly dismissing the "magazine people" as disingenuous, Wallace draws paralliptical attention to his own disingenuousness in writing the piece at all.

lallating function

James Wood suggested the term "hysterical realism"

He struggles to decide whether rap merely represents the decocted-and-simplified desires of the other, or whether it in fact represents the reality of the other