Editing David Foster Wallace (section)

===Themes and styles===
Wallace wanted to progress beyond the [[irony]] and [[metafiction]] associated with [[postmodernism]] and explore a [[Post-postmodernism|post-postmodern]] or [[Metamodernism|metamodern]] style. In the essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" (written 1990, published 1993),<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Wallace |first=David Foster |title=E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction |journal=Review of Contemporary Fiction |volume=13 |issue=2 |pages=151–194}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.nottinghilleditions.com/essay/e-unibus-pluram-television-and-us-fiction-written-1990-published-in-the-review-of-contemporary-fiction-1993-and-reprinted-in-a-supposedly-fun-thing-ill-never-do-again-1997/|title=E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction|website=Notting Hill Editions|access-date=March 29, 2021}}</ref> he proposed that television has an ironic influence on fiction, and urged literary authors to eschew TV's shallow rebelliousness: 
{{Blockquote|I want to convince you that irony, poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are distinctive of those features of contemporary U.S. culture (of which cutting-edge fiction is a part) that enjoy any significant relation to the television whose weird, pretty hand has my generation by the throat. I'm going to argue that irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that, at the same time, they are agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture, and that, for aspiring fictionists, they pose terrifically vexing problems.}}

Wallace used many forms of irony, but tended to focus on individual persons' continued longing for earnest, unself-conscious experience and communication in a media-saturated society.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Dowling |first=William C. |author-link=William C. Dowling |title=A Reader's Companion to Infinite Jest |url=http://rci.rutgers.edu/%7Ewcd/jestcomp.htm |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110412061813/http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~wcd/jestcomp.htm |archive-date=April 12, 2011 |access-date=February 26, 2011 |publisher=[[Rutgers University]]}}</ref>

Wallace's fiction combines narrative modes and authorial voices that incorporate jargon and invented vocabulary, such as self-generated abbreviations and acronyms, long, multi-[[clause]] sentences, and an extensive use of explanatory [[Note (typography)|endnotes]] and footnotes, as in ''Infinite Jest'' and the story "Octet" (collected in ''[[Brief Interviews with Hideous Men]]''), and most of his non-fiction after 1996. In a 1997 interview on ''[[Charlie Rose (talk show)|Charlie Rose]]'', Wallace said that the notes were to disrupt the linear narrative, to reflect his perception of reality without jumbling the narrative structure, and that he could have jumbled the sentences "but then no one would read it".<ref>{{Cite web |title=Charlie Rose – Jennifer Harbury & Robert Torricelli / David Foster Wallace | date=April 11, 2010 |url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLPStHVi0SI  |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/youtube/20211211/mLPStHVi0SI| archive-date=2021-12-11 |url-status=live|access-date=February 26, 2011 |publisher=YouTube}}{{cbignore}}</ref>

D. T. Max has described Wallace's work as an "unusual mixture of the cerebral and the hot-blooded",<ref>{{Cite web |last=Max |first=D. T. |date=December 2012 |title=A Meaningful Life |url=http://untitledbooks.com/features/features/a-meaningful-life-by-dt-max/ |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150217050118/http://untitledbooks.com/features/features/a-meaningful-life-by-dt-max/ |archive-date=February 17, 2015 |access-date=September 21, 2014 |website=Untitled Books |issue=50}}</ref> often featuring multiple protagonists and spanning different locations in a single work. His writing comments on the fragmentation of thought,<ref>{{Cite web |last1=Stern |first1=Travis W. |last2=McLaughlin |first2=Robert L. |date=Spring 2000 |title="I Am in Here": Fragmentation and the Individual in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest |url=http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/iaminhere.htm |access-date=September 21, 2014 |publisher=The Howling Fantods}}</ref> the relationship between happiness and boredom, and the psychological tension between the beauty and hideousness of the human body.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Feeney |first=Matt |date=April 12, 2011 |title=Infinite Attention – David Foster Wallace and being bored out of your mind |url=http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2011/04/infinite_attention.html |access-date=September 21, 2014 |website=[[Slate (magazine)|Slate]]}}</ref> According to Wallace, "fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being", and he said he wanted to write "morally passionate, passionately moral fiction" that could help the reader "become less alone inside".<ref>{{Cite magazine |last=Max |first=D. T. |date=January 7, 2009 |title=David Foster Wallace's Struggle to Surpass ''Infinite Jest'' |url=http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_max |access-date=February 26, 2011 |magazine=The New Yorker}}</ref> In his Kenyon College commencement address, Wallace described the human condition as daily crises and chronic disillusionment and warned against succumbing to [[solipsism]],<ref>{{Cite magazine |last=Krajeski |first=Jenna |date=September 22, 2008 |title=This is Water |url=http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2008/09/this-is-water.html |magazine=The New Yorker}}</ref> invoking the existential values of compassion and mindfulness:

{{Blockquote|The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.&nbsp;... The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't.&nbsp;... The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness.<ref>{{Cite news |date=September 19, 2008 |title=David Foster Wallace on Life and Work |work=The Wall Street Journal |url=https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122178211966454607}}</ref>}}