David Foster Wallace on Suicide

In The Pale King, Wallace revealed his knowledge of suicide and his sense of ennui with his craft. Mention of the character’s love for Dorian Gray on page 99, which keeps him from school one day so that he can read ahead, is perhaps tied in with Wallace’s own beliefs on suicide. Wallace’s manuscript for The Pale King is personal: blatantly and in a post-modern tone, autobiographical with his fiction, exemplified in §9, §23, and §38. Gray committed suicide after he had committed the sin of first-degree murder, and after death, his body became youthful looking again, to the surprise of those who find it. I think Wallace’s interest in Wilde’s novel was invested in that suicide brought a product better than life itself, a grass-is-greener ideology.

His mention of Émile Durkheim’s Le Suicide on page 291 is more germane than Dorian Gray. Knowing Durkheim’s categorizations of suicide, I’d say that Wallace’s writing shows an anomic sentiment. Economic disaster is what the Frenchman tied to anomie, and Wallace was dead in the same year as his country’s bailout. Chris Fogle of §22, one of the masterful subsections of the unfinished novel, makes Wallace sound empirical and the character of §22 is so directionless as to be self-described as dangerously nihilistic.

Looking at the Notes and Asides, Wallace’s embryonic outline says “Central Deal: Realism, monotony. Plot a series of set-ups for stuff happening, but nothing actually happens.” This is best seen in the video interviews of §14 where an anonymous character describes a play that they want to write. I think it describes the anomie of the author himself: “‘Except I could never decide on the action, if there was any, if it’s a realistic play.’” I think this is the fatalistic consequence of contemporary literature’s society’s doting upon realism.