Oblivion: Stories - Analysis

Analysis

Criticism of this collection has involved attempts to discuss the collection as a whole, in relation to other work by Wallace, and as individual stories. In general, Marshall Boswell claimed that this was Wallace’s “bleakest” work of fiction. In Oblivion, he “uncharacteristically” provides “no way out” of solipsism and loneliness. Boswell further suggested that the collection “repeatedly undermines many of the techniques for alleviation” from loneliness, like communicating through language, that Wallace presented in Infinite Jest. "Oblivion," he writes, “remains unique in Wallace’s oeuvre in its unrelenting pessimism." Additionally, D.T. Max wrote that the stories in the Oblivion "seem afraid of compression, as if the title were a threat that could only be defended against by the relentlessly engaged consciousness."

Many critics have linked Oblivion to other works by Wallace, both fiction and nonfiction. D.T. Max asserted that many of the stories are "successors" to Brief Interviews with Hideous Men in that they “concerned themselves mostly with middle-aged, middle-class white men in middle America." Others claim that Oblivion and The Pale King are companion texts. Max wrote that while this collection was “descriptive” of a lonely American society, The Pale King would be “prescriptive,” suggesting a “way out of the bind.” Marshall Boswell also claimed that The Pale King is the “compositional companion” to Oblivion. Both works concern themselves with similar themes like the management of “entropy” and “shit, art, death." But The Pale King can ultimately be seen as a “corrective, or at least dialectical partner, to Oblivion’s haunted insularity.” Additionally, Boswell linked Oblivion to This Is Water, in that it depicts adults “hypnotized by the constant monologues” inside their heads, as well as “Decideraization 2007,” an essay that appears in Both Flesh and Not, in its occupation with entropy and sorting data and a “surfeit of information.” Tom Tracey observed that “The Soul Is Not a Smithy” particularly both resembles The Pale King and recalls the philosophy of This Is Water in its discussion of attention and boredom.

Other critics have examined more individual stories more closely. Thomas Tracey asserts that, in “The Soul Is Not a Smithy” as well as many of the other stories in Oblivion, Wallace seeks to “place the crucial events of each tale beyond the frame of the main exposition.” Indeed, “the important actions of the narrative are seen to occur only on the extreme periphery of the narrator’s awareness.” Tracy suggests that the meaning and goal of this is to “call for greater attentiveness to our peripheral surroundings” and to show that “the most important events of our lives often take place on the margins of our quotidian experience.” Tracey also maintains that the narrator’s inattentiveness in class also depicts how “imaginiation can provide a psychological outlet, or refuge, from suffering.”

In the same essay, Tracey further develops his thoughts on the title story, “Oblivion,” which raises questions about what reality is, and what is real. The story, Tracy asserts, gives an ambiguous answer, which suggests that what is real and true comes from our own decisions about what to believe. He also argued that the story is an "imaginative response" to Decartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy.

Walter Kirn, in a review for The New York Times, claims that "Good Old Neon" focuses on “a philosophical conundrum: the question of whether human beings can be said to possess authentic selves or whether, like 'David Wallace,' the story's narrator, we are really just a bunch of shabby fakes cut off from our own and others' essential beings by the inadequacy of language.”