just read this and it was literally me, the short story. now,

Kys or don't post again.

>>8631552
>it was literally me, the short story
Get help.

DFW wrote to impress yuppies and academics with no talent themselves. He was very intelligent and desperate to be seen as a cool literary type when he was just a dork.

File: DFW6.png (215KB, 474x350px) Image search: [Google]

215KB, 474x350px

>>8631552

I'm glad you changed your mind about adding question marks to everything. It just makes the sentence scan so wrong.

>essay disguised as a story

Welcome to Literary Fiction.

>>8632336
>Welcome to Literary Fiction.
not sure if dfw is a good example to show to someone who literally never read ""literary"" fiction before

>>8632327
>Get help.

why? looked it up and this particular story is kinda famous. but its so.. incessantly autistic, except for the end where you can appreciate a cognitive shift in the narrator, which i guess is the point.

but really, do people enjoy reading this? what do they get from it? witnessing the internal dialog of someone like that is tiresome.

>>8631552
>>8633550
I find it difficult to see how someone /couldn't/ enjoy a story like Good Old Neon in our present times.

Just think about the circumstances of the Advertising Executive's upbringing. He had a voice inside him calling him out on his fraudulence ever since he was young, and no one could tell. But once he reached a point in his life where he sat around to think about it, that voice grew stronger and stronger; its accusations more and more closer to the truth that he knew himself. In my opinion, its indictment is one on the modern self.

If given the opportunity, we will all feel the same way he did towards the end of his analysis sessions with Dr. Gustafson. It just took an incredibly inward looking perspective from him, as well as an arena to voice it, his writings and therapy, that helped him reach the end of the road sooner than everyone else. We are all blinded in life by a since of purpose for living in the world around us, and casting aside DFW's rhetoric built around the fragility of time in the short story, which is somewhat dubious but is used to great affect, it is simple for any attentive person to see the same recursion of dialogue critiquing the worth of anything one does in the setting of the world around them to the extent the advertising guy did in our own lives.

I personally was a big fan of the writing style. His attempts to polish off everything he really meant to say were reminiscent of how I myself deal with my actions, so I'm speaking with that familiarity as well. It is a good feeling to read a story that echoes how you think, even if it may be labeled as incredibly useless and sufferingly redundant.

In my opinion, if you don't think like the narrator in Good Old Neon, if you don't ask yourself the same questions, question the world around you, and why you subscribe to acting, as opposed to judging your actions as a dramatist, then you're simply ignorant.

>>8633593
>It is a good feeling to read a story that echoes how you think

it echoed way too much, i didnt say it was literally me as a meme. why would it be a good feeling to read about a phony faggot internal musings? im not saying it was badly or poorly done, it was a very fine description of the overanalyzing analytical personality and the perpetual feeling of detachment from the world that comes with it. but, still, is that everything that is to that story? is it about what it says it is and nothing else?

>>8633646

I would say, take from it what you wish. It could just be that. But most importantly observing the sad fate of the protagonist of Good Old Neon involves understanding his death, and how it came to pass. All the descriptions of time and eternity, etc. may not necessarily be 100% true, although I do think they are interesting, and are really just there to provide a suitable platform for that voice.

This is what I did anyway- I started asking myself what about it paralleled with my life, and why it deviates in the way it does. DFW himself I think would say that Good Old Neon is an expose of sorts, not meant to simply summarize the death of a heavy thinking man, but also to illuminate the life's architecture around the executive that DFW thought was important enough, and able to convey his concept well enough, that he used it in a story format used solely to be able to communicate it and thus say what he himself probably thought as well.

It's an interesting story because it's hard to find push back from outside influences if you think like the man in Good Old Neon. That is the crux of the issue- things like me typing this paragraph feel superfluous because the bridge to reality is only moderated by my own thoughts and the conversation that goes on in them that closely resembles that seen in the story. Or maybe that too is the point, that seeing an example of a way of thought is not altogether important at all, and finding oneself experiencing revelry in finding it in Good Old Neon is simply the author's way of fooling the reader into stepping out of the intensely guarded shell of internal dialogue that the story itself represents and mirrors as it is read.

So, there are a variety of issues with how to understand the meaning and true impact of Good Old Neon for oneself. I know I myself will think very hard on it. I don't necessarily feel like these posts have been a performance, mind you, as the advertising executive in the story would, but I do feel the same push and pull of the self aware, infinitely recurring self-dialogue having some measured impact on the words I am able to sum it up in. Maybe that too is part of it. There are many intriguing parts of the story even after it's read, which is why I will think about it for a long time.

i guess DFW just isnt for me. enjoyed consider the lobster, though.

is literally me too
>tfw stopped going to therapy

>>8634664
>mfw when i was the most advanced student in my transpersonal psychology class
>mfw i gave fellow girl students orgasms with my deep resonating mantras after 40 minutes of holotropic breathwork
>mfw my teacher thought i was the most "connected one"
>mfw she got the hots for me too every time i did my elaborate theatrics
>mfw i despised her and thought she was basic trash for not seeing through my facade, and for being a phony spiritual poser

>>8634709

Sounds like you're an idiot for even going to that kind of thing desu