this was great. i wish DFW developed as a smug ironist and magical

How banal of you to say what you really think

>>7787347
It's sad, really.

he wrote this as a undergrad too

>>7787327
I thought it was decent. What were your thoughts on the ending?

Much of the influence comes from DeLillo's debut "Americana", including the head-shaped-city thing which comes from a reference in DeLillo's novel about how John Wayne (IIRC) was so big in town that there was talk of building a city shaped like him or something.

DFW claims not to have read Pynchon but he also claimed not to have read BEE and people have called him out on that saying how influenced he was by BEE being so young at the time of publication etc.

There was actually an ex-student of Wittgenstein's affiliated with Amherst and who lived nearby that DFW knew about, which was obviously an influence to him when thinking up the plot.

Two of the main influences in terms of prose were Nabokov's Lolita (which influenced Rick's objectification of Lenore: the detailed "romantic" parts being superficially endearing but also somewhat creepy in their being so superficial) and Run, Rabbit by John Updike, which DFW thought (and later suggested in his novel about old authors close to death, including Updike, and solipsism) was misogynistic but also pretty entertaining. The character of Biff Diggerence is based on Updike, and like Updike Biff comes from Shantilly, Virginia (or whichever obscurish town/city Updike is from).

The essential theme of the book IMO is the nature of personhood in relation to language. Is the parrot a person for being able to mimic the reverend and Lenore's crude housemate? Is the psychologists's doll a person since he carries it around and talks to it? Is the city itself a person since it's shaped like one and has in its brain a switchboard (albeit a malfunctioning one) connecting the city? Are the babies who are fed the special babyfood people (babies not typically being granted the kind of full personhood an older child otherwise has) for being able to precociously verbalize etc? Lenore is twinned with her Gramma (most obviously by name) because like her grandmother she feels that she lacks a function and therefore is in a weird gray area in terms of being a person, since as Witt-chan says the meaning of something is associated with its function. Like the city swithcboard shaped like an actress's head (an actress herself associated with her grandmother), Lenore's thoughts are misdirected, and like a character in a fictional novel Lenore's story is told throughout by a rapid, obsessively detailed narrative voice much like that of Rick, her obsessive and jealous lover. The only chapter really in which we get any different style of dialogue is the childishly-written first one, where Lenore refuses to sign herself away to the men (and thus forfeits a function in the way women at the time often found one, namely by marrying).

what's updike?

>>7788406
Not much, what's updike with you?

>>7788406
Does he actually use this?
Insufferable.

>>7788387
This post is filled with half truths and misinformation. Don't post again.

he was kinda both

>>7787347
it's postirony

>>7787327
>FROM THE AUTHOR OF INFINITE JEST
>NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE
>EPIC, SIMPLY FUCKING EPIC - THE HUFFINGTON POST

Am I the only one that hates this shit? I actively avoid covers that have excess information like this pasted all over them.

>>7791368
I wish when they did that the cover behind the dustcover would look the same but without the text so you could just throw away the dustcover.

>>7791368

>EVOKES [SOME RENOWNED CANON AUTHOR WAY BETTER THAN THIS ONE]

It makes me wonder how many of the quotes are from sarcastic industry shills. They're just so shameless.

>>7787327
Yeah, I actually found it a lot more entertaining than Infinite Jest. He put some of his impending existential crisis into it, but he wasn't trying so desperately to write a self-help book like he was with IJ so there were no platitudes mucking it up.

>>7791798
Welcome to publishing 101. People are paid to say a lot of the shit you read in blurbs. This goes without exception for every traditionally published book. There's no real integrity in the process.