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Despite the specificity of Sartre's view of consciousness, it fits the general existentialist view of the individual having to become a self, instead of having a self as some sort of inner core. For example, Kierkegaard--as we will see further on in this study--describes the self in similar terms.
In a talk that he gave on Franz Kafka, a writer who is also an important representative of the existentialist tradition, Wallace formulates an almost identical view of the self. Wallace remarks that in our present age it is a common mistake to think 'that a self is something you just have.' According to Wallace, we should acknowledge the central insight of existentialism, 'that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home' (Wallace also explicitly compares Kafka to Kierkegaard in this respect). And in this context Wallace's statement, 'Although of course you end up becoming yourself' (which became the title of David Lipsky's 300-page 'road trip' interview with Wallace from which it is derived), has a strong existentialist ring to it, asserting the need to become yourself. Also, the Sartrean view that the self arises outside consciousness, that consciousness has to be directed towards the world in order to discover the self, fits Wallace's (in this respect quite Sartrean) credo - mentioned in the Introduction--that consciousness needs to be facing outward and not be bent-inwards.
great summary
In reflective objectification consciousness is turned into a thing, but because consciousness is a nothingness that cannot be determined as a thing-like essence, the objectification of consciousness will always remain strained. It causes an insoluble tension, because it tries to determine something that can never by fully determined. Therefore, Sartre calls self-reflective objectification 'a perpetually deceptive mirage': it goes against the freedom (transcendence) that consciousness 'is'. It is in this context that Sartre states: 'myself-as-object' is an 'uneasiness'. Elsewhere, he uses the more well-known term 'alienation': objectification is an alientation from myself, an 'alienation of my own possibilities'.
I think that a kind of cynicism is dangerous, but so is its opposite, being unquestioning, undoubting. You want to be somewhere in the middle
footnote 4, from an interview den Dulk conducted with Foer
[...] To illustrate that A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is 'truly a work from "the Age of Irony", Korthals mentions that the work is 'full of postmodern games with typography, expanding footnotes et cetera', and asks, rhetorically: 'How post-ironic can an author with such a media-conscious and self-conscious main character be?' However, the elements that Korthals mentions (further on, she also adds 'polyphony' and 'ambiguity') are not necessarily even expressions of verbal irony (compare the aforementioned pop references in Wallace); they might just as well be regarded--perhaps even more plausibly--as normal aspects of the portrayal of contemporary reality. Above all, the mere presence of these elements in the book, even as potential verbal ironies, does not automatically undercut its critique of existential irony. Also, how could one then ever critique contemporary reality, if just describing that reality would by definition imply ironizing one's critique of it?
on critics who conflate verbal and existential irony and thus unfairly excoriate DFW etc. referring specifically to Korthals Altes' "Blessedly Post-Ironic"
It is important to note that irony is a purely negative movement: it destroys what is given, thereby liberating the individual, but it does not contribute anything to the formulation of the new, to the content of the individual's self-becoming. Therefore, the freedom that arises from this break with immediacy, is a negative freedom: a freedom-from. Kierkegaard writes that in irony, 'the subject is negatively free, since the actuality that is supposed to give the subject content is not there. He is free from the constraint in which the given actuality holds the subject, but he is negatively free and as such is suspended, became there is nothing that holds him'.
Kierkegaard calls this form of irony, Socratic. According to Kierkegaard, existential irony came into the world with Socrates. Socrates used irony to topple the immediate actuality of his time, which to him had lost its validity. For Kierkegaard, the liberation that Socrates brings about, is the essential stepping stone towards a personal moral interpretation of one's existence. The negative freedom that it brings about is a necessary condition for the subsequent formulation of a positive freedom (a freedom-to), in which one gives actual content (positivity) to one's freedom and establishes one's self-chosen moral framework. However, because irony is pure negation, it cannot be the source of that positivity. Consequently, Kierkegaard concludes that irony should only be employed temporarily, and that subsequently one should start to give positive meaning to one's freedom.
In A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius the critique of the ironic attitude is most evident in the passages concerning Might Magazine. As mentioned in the previous section, the book offers a positive portrayal of the original (however vague) ambitions of the magazine. But soon these ambitions are lost to an attitude of total negative irony:
We begin a pattern of almost immediate opinion-reversal and self-devouring. Whatever the prevailing thinking, especially our own, we contradict it. We change our minds about Wendy Kopp, the young go-getter we heralded in the first issue, and her much-celebrated Teach for America. [...] in a 6,000-word piece that dominates the second issue, we fault the nonprofit for attempting to solve inner-city problems, largely black problems, with white upper-middle-class college-educated solutions. 'Paternalistic condescension,' we say. 'Enlightened self interest,' we sigh.
This passage summarizes the ironic-aesthetic attitude of the editorial staff of Might: every position, every idea has a flip side that can and thus has to be exposed. Timmer writes: 'They are so accustomed to a negative dialectic or a deconstructive attitude that they are much better at articulating what they do not want than they are at formulating any constructive goals and visions.' Initially, this 'deconstructive' activity might even seem like a viable and worthwhile activity in itself. But, as becomes clear from their choice of targeting vulnerable, idealistic initiative, the editors' irony serves, above all, to liberate them from commitment to any of these positions, and insulates them from any criticism that might be brought against them. For Might's editors, the ironic stance of 'immediate opinion-reversal'--that is, to he `positionless'--seems to be the only viable, safe attitude.
However, in the course of the book the editorial staff grow more and more frustrated with their own endless irony. The emptiness of the aesthetic attitude starts to dawn on them; their work becomes 'depressing, routine': 'We debunk the idea of college in general, and marriage, and makeup, and the Grateful Dead - it is our job to point out all this artifice, everywhere.' In the end, Might Magazine loses out to general frustration. The editorial staff realize that their ironic efforts have led to nothing. They have exposed falsity and artificiality everywhere, but have offered no alternatives. As Timmer observes: 'Might, in that sense, implodes. It implodes because their critical stance is deconstructive and eventually turns inwards.' In the end, the editors stand empty-handed: 'all these hundreds of thousands of hours, were going to end without our having saved anyone [. . .]--what had it all been? It had been something to do, some small, small point to make, and the point was made, in a small way'.
quote from Heartbreaking p 240-1
[...] These two literary trends can be seen to represent the two senses in which the term postmodernism is most often employed: on the one hand, a theoretical postmodernism, signifying a predominantly 'academic' problematization and subversion of beliefs considered to be central to modernist thought or Western thought in general; and on the other hand, a popular postmodernism, referring to a broader societal situation, namely, the widely shared perception of reality as having become uncertain and devoid of value. [...]
Barth and Ellis, respectively
'Oh God comma I abhor self-consciousness.' This sentence from John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse is emblematic of the reflexive irony of Barth's fiction: it professes an aversion to self-reflectivity, while actually wallowing in it. [...]
The historical period we are living through has been singularly uncertain, insecure, self-questioning and culturally pluralistic. Contemporary fiction clearly reflects this dissatisfaction with, and breakdown of, traditional values. Previously, as in the case of nineteenth-century realism, the forms of fiction derived from a firm belief in a commonly experienced, objectively existing world of history. Modernist fiction, written in the earlier part of this century, responded to the initial loss of belief in such a world. [...] Contemporary metafictional writing is both a response and a contribution to an even more thoroughgoing sense that reality or history are provisional: no longer a world of eternal verities but a series of constructions, artifices, impermanent structures.
This 'thoroughgoing' awareness of the 'provisional', 'constructed' character of reality and history is expressed, according to Brian McHale, by a shift from mainly 'epistemological' questions as the 'dominant' (the position from which the world is interrogated) of the previous literary period, for example 'How can I interpret this world of which I am part?', to mainly 'ontological' questions, for example 'what and how is this world?,' as the `dominant' of the new trend of metafictional literature. This shift in the literary interrogation of the world is equated by Waugh, Federman and McHale to the shift from modernist to postmodernist literature. Therefore, this literary trend is often labelled as 'postmodernist metafiction' (which is also the term that Wallace uses).
quoted from Waugh's Metafiction (book 49)
Postmodernist metafictional writing, by reflecting on itself, that is, by showing how it is structured, how it has come into being, openly displays its artificial character [...] In doing so, these works expressly deny that they are trying to project a reality by offering a credible story. These metafictional texts pierce their own illusionary reality (and thereby, that of other pieces of fiction) by revealing the artificiality that underlies it. Such a text, writes Waugh, 'lays bare its rules in order to investigate the relation of "fiction" to "reality", the concept of "pretence"'. '[I]t systematically disturbs the air of reality by foregrounding the ontological structure of texts and of fictional worlds,' writes McHale: 'we are left facing the words on the page: this happens again and again in postmodernist writing, [...] our attention is distracted from the projected world and made to fix on its linguistic medium'. This 'disturbance' of the 'air of reality' is meant to contribute to an awareness of the fact that what we regard, outside literary texts, as our normal, unproblematic everyday reality, is likewise a fictional, artificial construct. McHale speaks of 'destabilizing the ontology of this projected world and simultaneously laying bare the process of work construction'.
The reflexive-ironic nature of postmodernist metafiction is clear: its essential operation is a constant ironic self-distancing through the self-conscious unveiling of its own structures. This strategy has an idealistic purpose: it wants to unmask the illusions that we regard as reality.
so this irony is aimed at liberation, and is important and necessary in its own right, but you need something afterwards!