Wallace's etiology of his own biased perspective is neither cure nor excuse for its intransitiveness

on the one hand, it marks him out as what he believes himself to be, pinning him to the White American Male paradigm, while on the other hand, it actively and repeatedly repudiates that label, invoking a kind of paralliptical self-negation

his frames of reference zigzag wildly from bathos to profundity

he invoked Updike's craftsmanship as the epitome of ars gratia artis, while also suggesting that Updike "had never had an unpublished thought."

this tension between veneration and excoriation, often expressed in the same breath, a kind of schizoaffective critical articulation, is a dominant motif in his engagement with recent cultural shifts

While he tended to elide the "American" from his discussion of what it meant to be an American human being, Wallace was explicitly, exhaustingly conscious of writing from an American perspective, and repeatedly articulated his struggles with taking a perspective outside of his own. Lee Konstantinou comprehensively traces Wallace's engagement with media stimulation and the performative cosmopolitanism of a type of educated American, suggesting that Wallace's engagement with informational "discloses some of the most troubling aporia of [his] style. Wallace's inability to represent a genuine cosmopolitanism in ['The Suffering Channel'] is not simply an individual failure but is, for him, an indictment of the very 'view' that he understands himself to be inhabiting". The paralyzing consciousness of mediated perspective, then, positions Wallace as an uncomfortably but inescapably American author. Konstantinou points out, indeed that the critical tendency to read Wallace in light of his American-ness, even his most specifically local texts "[showcase] a longing for the international," but notes that this longing is unmet in "The Suffering Channel," trapped by its own self-focus. Konstantinou astutely notes that Wallace's internationalism is different from the globalism of De Lillo or Pynchon, and emerges from a desire to disrupt the myopic ethnocentricity of late-century America. [...]

mirrors processes of adolescent self-definition, functioning as an anodyne of sorts to infantile narcisissm, refusing to look beyond the borders of its own importance

[...] "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature," explicitly invokes Rortian philosophy, taking its title from Rorty's 1979 book of the same name. [...]

[...] "The Soul is Not a Smithy", in its invocation of Joyce's artistic credo, seems also to resist ideas of the capacity of literature to formulate and maintain a coherent identity. [...]

[...] While Wallace may also have been referring to Pynchon, to Tennyson, More, or Lytton, or indeed to all simultaneously, the echoes of Keats throughout the text strongly suggest "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" as a--if not the--title source for the novel.

to limn and to limit