Oblivion signals that Wallace, while still holding work to be sacred, has largely given up his faith in the powers of the Protestant call to work that echoed throughout his writing up through Infinite Jest. Less prominent in Oblivion and after is the writer who allegorizes work in terms of Lenore's swichboard and foot-pounds, while newly emergent are dull, long-term workplaces, rended in detail and at length: advertising agencies, insurance offices, demographic systems. Jobs themselves now spread out to form characters' mental ground, and work no longer really works for one's well-being. As Walter Kirn writes in his review of Oblivion, "Often the jobs we do end up doing us." If, in Infinite Jest's Hegelian code, transcendence potentially lay in absorpotion, in Oblivion all is distraction; no one really forgets himself, except perhaps the narrator of "Smithy" (to his peril). [...]