The term "dialogic" here, and elsewhere in this study, is intentionally ambiguous. It refers both to Bakhtinian dialogism--that is, pertaining to double-voicedness, either narrative or linguistic--and to the state of being in dialogue.

The philosopher Richard Rorty held that the purpose of philosophy is not to find answers, but to keep the conversation going. In Wallace's writing, the same perspective is visible.

the fundamental unbridgeability of the gap between self and other is reinforced. That gap entails alterity, the nexus of subjectivity in the objectof communication that cannot be reached by communicative intent

Barry Dingle's homunculus never achieves his telos

The teleological imperative of postmodernism is to will its own decline, to question itself into silence, which is Wallace's central problem with it.

I advocate a reading that moves away from the inclination to sui generis reading and toward a sense of him as a writer deeply embedded in literary and cultural history

While Rorty is explicitly invoked in the title of a later short story--"Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature," taken from Rorty's 1979 book of the same name--Wallace also referred to Stanley Cavell at least once, and his influence on Wallace's work has gained increasing attention in the recent past. Wallace owned and annotated a number of Cavell's books, and his biographer D. T. Max notes that Wallace studied--briefly and somewhat unedifyingly--under Cavell at Harvard. Adam Kelly has noted the importance of Cavell's ideas on language for Wallace's exploration of sincerity in his work. Of particular relevance to our work here is Cavell's invocation of the role of reader in the process of textual production, and his extrapolation from this question to ask "when is writing done?," implicitly averring the constant reproduction by the reader of the process of interpretation. This question is central to Wallace's idea of the process of communication, and his implicit belief (via Wittgenstein) that good fiction should open rather than close, undermine rather than order. [...]

challenging the too-frequent tendency toward hagiographical, sui generis readings

[...] Scholars have drawn attention to his links with Leibniz and James, with Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, with Cantor and deMan, as well as with Cavell [...]

the comedy of ungoverned infant volubility