by
Jon Baskin
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[...] The stillness and enclosedness of the poet's environment reflects an inner condition of decadent self-satisfaction, which Wallace depicts as stagnant or lifeless. Iannis Goerlandt says that "one of the points the story makes is that the end lies in this stasis, not in death itself." The story's title, "Death Is Not the End," is most naturally taken as referring to the artist's desire for immortality through art. But it is precisely this desire, Wallace implies, that causes death to come before the end. Paradoxically, the artist's desire to stand apart and transcend finitude or death will lead him to create dead or lifeless art; after all, there is only one way - as Cavell would say - to escape the human.
A solution to this problem might seem to be to deny that the judgment of others has anything to do with who we are or what we mean - that is, to decisively privilege our "inner" selves over the self that we expose to the public. But this option, sometimes associated with romanticism or modernism in the arts, is connected in Brief Interviews to the temptation to remain "forever overhead," like the decadently isolated writer in "Death Is Not the End" or the boy poised on the edge of the diving board. [...]
responding to the conundrum posed in "radically condensed history of postindustrial life"
[...] Brief Interviews presents many characters seeking to secure victory over skepticism and thereby over their dependence on other people and on the external world - a view from "forever overhead," as it were. In criticzing this aspiration - a criticism carried out not through analysis but via a representation of its practical and moral consequences - Wallace encourages just such an endless refusal of victory. [...]