Author: David Foster Wallace
Summary of author:
Born in Ithaca, New York, in 1962, David Foster Wallace wrote dazzling journalistic pieces, short stories and novels, becoming best known for his second novel, Infinite Jest (1996), a massive, multi-layered work. Critics found Wallace’s dense writing both exhilarating and maddening, and his style. Wallace was an American writer and university instructor in the disciplines of English and creative writing. He was also known for being a maximalist writer known for his novel Infinite Jest and dozens of non-fiction magazine pieces, among other works.Fittingly, his father was a philosophy professor and his mother was an English teacher.So his family had a background of literacy. His novel Infinite Jest was listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005.Wallace was a hot commodity after Infinite Jest was released, and he began taking on journalistic assignments from national literary magazines such as Harper’s and the Atlantic, using his maximalist style to reinvent the magazine article. Wallace stuck with shorter (relatively speaking) pieces generally, and several collections of fiction and non-fiction appeared over the course of his career, including A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997), Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999) and Oblivion (2004).
Wallace was busy teaching as well, holding posts at Emerson College, Illinois State University and Pomona College. Along the way, he was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award and a Whiting Writers’ Award. In the end, Wallace couldn’t escape the depression that had plagued him for 20 years, and he committed suicide on September 12, 2008, in Claremont, California. His last novel, The Pale King, was published in 2011. He’s created over 25 books within his time. The book “brief interviews with hideous men”, was then directed into a movie by John krasinski. This man’s writings and readings have inspired others to create it into a film. He’s also had many other significant writings such as This is Water and The Devil is a Busy Man.
Story: The Devil is a Busy Man
In his short story “The Devil is a Busy Man,” David Foster Wallace asserts that Americans are obsessed with maintaining a facade of sincerity; ironically, this desire to appear sincere is the tragic root of the country’s widespread insincerity. The narrator frets over the perception of the “nice thing [they did] for someone” and laments, “A lack of namelessness on my part would destroy the ultimate value of the nice act,” arguing that the expectation of recognition—wanting someone to acknowledge a generous act “empties” the gesture of any value. The narrator is not concerned with being a good person, but rather being perceived as a good person. It is not that the narrator truly wishes to remain anonymous, throughout the story, s/he tries to resist the temptation of consciously revealing their identity, it is that their desire to receive “affection and approval” is outweighed by their fear of seeming gauche and selfish. To this end, Wallace demonstrates that America is most saliently concerned with maintaining appearances. Even though the narrator freely admits that, internally, s/he wants to be acknowledged for their kind deed, they would be loathe to let others know that. This suggests that hiding one’s internal feelings.
- Why do you think Wallace wrote the dialogue of the story like this? What is the reason he uses no period, but instead, he uses commas?
- Do you agree with Wallace as he says “it is difficult to do something for someone and not want them, desperately, to know that the identity of the individual who did it for them was you”?
- Do you think the man on the other end of the call, knew the narrator on the phone was the man who had given him the money? Do you feel as if he came off euphemism as he states?
