“Everyone Knows It’s About Something Else, Way Down”: Boredom, Nihilism, and the Search for Meaning in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the “something else” that underlies information-age boredom, according to The Pale King’s “Author,” and analyzes the novel’s representations of boredom to that end. Wallace’s decade-long engagement with the problem of boredom, which ended with his suicide, and The Pale King’s longest section, the story of “Irrelevant” Chris Fogle, are read in context with existentialist philosophies, particularly Viktor Frankl’s and Albert Camus’s contrasting treatments of boredom in Man’s Search for Meaning and The Myth of Sisyphus, respectively. The “something” behind Fogle’s boredom appears in this light as an aimless, default, self-centered nihilism, which he overcomes temporarily by choosing to see meaning in a job that others might view as absurd: working for the IRS. The article concludes by noting that Fogle’s story and The Pale King in general significantly resist closed interpretation due to the open-endedness of Fogle’s narrative, his ongoing drug dependency, and the recursive overall structure of Wallace’s unfinished novel.

KEYWORDS:

• Boredom
• nihilism
• existentialism
• David Foster Wallace
• Viktor Frankl
• Albert Camus

Notes

1. For examples of relatively recent discussions of boredom as an experience of meaninglessness, see Patricia Meyer Spacks, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind; Elizabeth Goodstein, Experience Without Qualities (2005); and Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom (2005).

2. An example of an argument along these lines can be seen in Ralph Clare’s “The Politics of Boredom and the Boredom of Politics in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.”

3. Much could be added in this context toward comparing Søren Kierkegaard’s exposition on despair in The Sickness Unto Death with Wallace’s and Frankl’s treatments of nihilism and boredom. The Sickness Unto Death appears, in fact, to be a seminal text for both authors’ works. In this matter of boredom and despair as states of airlessness, consider, for instance, Kierkegaard’s statements on prayer and the hope of possibility through God, or faith, which he considers existentially vital: “To pray is also to breathe, and possibility is for the self what oxygen is for breathing” (70). Also, with respect to Wallace’s comments on modern distractions and busyness being about “something else, way down,” see Kierkegaard’s suggestion that a person who has become aware of being in despair “may try to keep himself in the dark about his state through diversions and in other ways, for example, through work and busyness as diversionary means, yet in such a way that he does not entirely realize why he is doing it, that it is to keep himself in the dark” (79). For an extended discussion of Kierkegaardian despair in Wallace’s work, especially Infinite Jest, see Stefan Hirt’s The Iron Bars of Freedom: David Foster Wallace and the Postmodern Self.

4. Christy Wampole’s November 17, 2012, article in The New York Times, “How to Live Without Irony,” has been cited as a typical example of associating Wallace with a “New Sincerity” movement. Wampole describes the 1990s as a decade that seems “relatively irony-free” in retrospect. Given Wallace’s own characterization of the 1990s in “E Unibus Pluram,” it would seem that his descriptions of irony and sincerity differ somewhat, if only in matters of degree, from Wampole’s.

5. Wallace used Man’s Search for Meaning as a seed for one of the fictional interviews in his 1999 collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. The interview in question features a man from “Nutley NJ” who describes Frankl’s work as “a great, great book […] about [Frankl’s] experience in the human Dark Side and preserving his human identity in the face of [a concentration] camp’s degradation and violence and suffering’s total ripping away of his identity” (Brief Interviews 116).

6. My thoughts on the implications of Wallace’s “tornado” idea owe a good deal to Stephen Burn’s article “‘A Paradigm for the Life of Consciousness’: Closing Time in The Pale King,” where he relates this tornadic structure to various features of the novel itself and argues that the spiraling reflects, among other things, Wallace’s sense of how consciousness works. For my own argument, I have added emphasis here on the emptiness, or vacuum, at the center of a tornado.

7. For a discussion of the absence of biographical proof for Wallace’s working for the IRS, see Max (256). Since no evidence has been found to show that Wallace was ever employed by the IRS, the “Author’s” claim that the young “David Wallace” worked for the Service and that “The Pale King is, in point of fact, more like a memoir than any kind of made-up story” (Pale King 69) come across as an odd sort of literary hoax. The “Author’s” discussion following this claim about the merits of memoir versus those of fiction, as well as his repeated assurances of sincerity, seem in this context to fit Elderon’s argument, that Wallace rejected the possibility of full-fledged, transparent realism and assumed either naïveté or chicanery (or both) lay behind attempts to portray oneself as thoroughly sincere. For reasons discussed in this article, I view this issue of sincerity as a concern secondary in The Pale King to boredom and its underlying sense of meaningless (i.e., the existential vacuum).

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Notes on contributors

Joseph F. Goeke

Joseph F. Goeke is a visiting assistant professor of English at High Point University. A native of St. Louis, Missouri, he published articles on Henry David Thoreau, Cherokee author John Rollin Ridge, and Mark Twain before taking up his current line of research on the spread of boredom, nihilism, and existential meaning as themes in U.S. literature.