David Foster Wallace

Good Old Neon

Gavin

Crushing. You think it's pretty clever at the start, and then it leaps up a level of simulation, and then it keeps iterating its own map until you find yourself very very high above life, quite cold, and very very far from ok. Probably a bit dangerous for some people.

Subtlety: it's easy to view this as some kind of critique of rationalism, since his entire problem consists in excessive thought, excessive self-attention, and the narrator notes that he realised his ultimate entrapment during a mathematical logic course. But it's an impossibly naive kind, the one which insists on the "criterion of rightness [or correctness]" being constantly stared at, instead of approximated and mostly obscured behind its sane heuristics. I say impossible but it is of course quite common, one of the 10 curses of major depression.

Detail, probably not accidental: Neal calls his (adoptive) parents his "step-parents". At one remove from him.

(view spoiler)[The end takes Neal's extraordinary recursive self-understanding / self-destruction to higher order: before he dies, Neal imagines DFW looking at a picture of Neal after he dies, and Neal imagines DFW's inner life, which includes a heartbreakingly deluded reflection on Neal as a perfect, uncontrived popular kid, and DFW's confusion at why Neal would do it, and then Neal imagines DFW's own Nealian disorder, and his continuing battle with himself to maybe not let irony and pessimism ruin this one thing, viz. DFW's attempted imaginative sympathy for Neal. And of course all of that is in DFW the author, one more level down. And after that there's only us. (hide spoiler)]

Misha

Finally a fiction with a plausibly complex inner voice and fine-but-not-great meta-cognition.

Good Old Neon

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