For Wallace, value, kept loose and polysemous, could connect depression's internal discourse

The balance scale, I argue, was the image to which he kept returning for reconciliation of his varied ambitions, beginning from his naming of his first protagonist--an LB--after a standard unit of weight, money, and work (from the Latin libra, balance) and continuing through his romancing of IRS balance sheets.

The effect of such forces is, for his characters, enervating

[...] Wallace also argues that literary texts are ideally engaged with proving existence: Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress should have been titled "I EXIST", which Wallace says is the "signal that throbs under most voluntary writing--& all good writing" [...]

in this essay that led him into the writing of Infinite Jest lies an allegorical ars poetica

My third and most important philosophical guidepost on value is axiology

a textbook petitio principii

attempts a fusion of semiotic, economic, and psychoanalytic systems

Unlike Pynchon, however, Wallace does not wish to dump the legacy of Calvinism; he seeks to build fictions around work and the fervent call to work, an activity he recurrently sees not just in terms of the labor theory of value but, through the lens of Hegel, as the only way of creating a fully viable self. Whether through an executive washroom attendant, diligent cruise-ship workers, or an actuary who dies prematurely of a heart attack, Wallace consistently makes work heroic and tragic, its lack, avoidance, or meaninglessness a sign of his most lost, and, in the realm of laborless capitalist value extraction, most evil figures. Absorption in work seems to be a reliable antidote to depression and feelings of worthlessness. Hegel's bondsman is a recurrent trope, as is metaphysical slavery in general.

Unlike Pynchon, however, Wallace does not wish to dump the legacy of Calvinism; he seeks to build fictions around work and the fervent call to work, an activity he recurrently sees not just in terms of the labor theory of value but, through the lens of Hegel, as the only way of creating a fully viable self.

Hegel's bondsman is a recurrent trope, as is metaphysical slavery in general.

The denigration of work, the celebration of efficiency, and the worship of the market are all hallmarks of the ideology that has dominated the United States since the late 1970s, neoliberalism. [...] At his most political, Wallace chronicles the long-term infiltration of neoliberal ideology into the American and global scene. Reagan's union busting plays a role in my analysis of Broom, and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) figures in Infinite Jest, which repeatedly makes ideas of freedom and trade, those neoliberal bywords, cross from political and economic spheres to the complexly interpersonal.

The denigration of work, the celebration of efficiency, and the worship of the market are all hallmarks of the ideology that has dominated the United States since the late 1970s, neoliberalism

if moral values are, like money, inherited, then so, too, may the morally impoverished of his 1980s generation, new versions of Horatio Alger, go get jobs

Wallace weds to the perspective of Hardt and Negri a Wittgensteinian awareness that there can be no metaphor capacious enough to capture language's operations.

I describe in chapter 4 the dialectic of computerized complexity and balance-scale simplicity that underlies the moral vision of Brief Interviews.

in addition to finding new dimensions in his representation of numismatics

Wallace's suicide has made for more personalized tributes and roman à clefs than studies of influence usually account for