A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

The author of several novels and other works, David Foster Wallace grew up in the Midwestern US. In the seven essays featured in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Wallace covers subjects ranging from attending a state fair to the cultural significance of television, to visiting David Lynch on set, yet Wallace himself is the common denominator. He is the first-person pronoun in the title, the “I” who provides his subjective perspective on the events, people, and places depicted in the essays. He thus emerges in the essays as a character in his own right as the overlapping discussions across the various subjects assemble his character. The recurring discussions of irony and alienation in effect reveal that these are chief among Wallace’s concerns, as he examines different subjects for the same ideas. Similarly, his awkward manner and constant sense of being an outsider (even when returning to his home state or being pampered aboard a luxury cruise) suggest that Wallace’s character is similarly awkward and as neurotic as the first-person perspective of the essays appears to be. Wallace is the same awkward presence whose junior tennis game frustrated much better players, whose constant overintellectualizing of social interactions led his friend to skewer him at the state fair, and whose minor misunderstanding with a cruise ship employee caused him to obsess over the situation for days.