Why did DFW feel the need to convey information about every single

>>9385633
What does the 'why' have to do with it? Either you enjoy Wallace's stylistic choices or you don't.

>>9385633
He felt it made him look smarter, which was extremely important to him because he was deeply insecure about his intelligence. He lied to others about his SAT scores, got into Amherst through his father rather than any academic ability, spent pages and pages on superfluous and often incorrect mathematical and chemical detail in his failed attempt at a novel, Infinite Jest, flunked out of grad school, and spent an enormous amount of time trying to convince himself he was smart. Eventually he killed himself because deep down he knew he was a pretentious fraud and not the genius he sold himself as.

>>9385633
think of it as a "saturation" of the text, the details have a realism that becomes almost insistant in that postmoderny way and the stories seem to chase their own implications so far that any interpretation you have has to be a little more subtle

>>9385742
Good old neon

>>9385742
That's actually pretty interesting....
Where did you get the bit where he lied about his SAT scores or about getting into Amherst? I'm curious...

Also, what mathematical stuff are you talking about? Are you talking about "Everything and more"?

>>9385633
Well, why not?
Don't forget he did lots of essays for Harper's, which kind of explains the broad variety of topic

>the purpose of writing essays about a wide variety of topics is to know more about the world >not to discover more about the self
>laughingmontaigne.jpg

>>9385633
Conveys the anxiety of modern life, and grounds you in an axiomatic sense of realism stretched by some weird occurences.

>>9386621
>"My father is an Amherst alumnus, and he also teaches at a big public university. The sum total of his college-application advice was that small liberal arts schools tended to be better for undergrads. So I visited several small LAS schools, of which Amherst was one. What I hadn’t known was that if you were the child of an alumnus, the Admissions guy would tell you right in the interview whether they’d take you or not. [Editor’s note: This no longer is true.] This is a huge perk, it seems to me, given the amount of hand-wringing and knuckle-biting my high-school classmates had to go through. Anyway, this perk, plus a laziness that made me not even bother applying anyplace else, is what brought me to Amherst."

https://www.amherst.edu/amherst-story/magazine/extra/node/66410