The difficulty of this task for the writer, explored in the interview with Larry McCaffery and in "E Unibus Pluram," is that it cannot succeed if the reader is passive, merely swept along by the story to a satisfying conclusion. Viewer passivity was the weapon of choice of corporate media, as Wallace saw it: "TV-type art's biggest hook is that it's figured out ways to reward passive spectation," by delivering the facsimile of a relationship without the work of a real relationship."

This is why he put such a premium on disrupting the flow of his text, to make readers aware that their work of decoding was being "mediated through a human consciousness." Frank Louis Cioffi identifies these techniques with Brecht's "alientation effects," in what is still the best analysis of the performative experience of reading one of Wallace's texts. The constant work of drawing the story together creates a "quirky, highly performative world with which the reader empathizes but from which she must also withdraw." This alienated engagement is not meant to be comfortable. The focus of Cioffi's essay is the thoroughly disturbing quality of Infinite Jest, where "scenes of exquisite horror and pain come in, as it were, under the radar, and hence make an enormous impact." [...]