For Quality and Training Purposes: Stories

Abstract

In David Foster Wallace's story "Good 01' Neon," Neil, the protagonist, recounts
to the reader the circumstances of his suicide from beyond the grave. Neil ends his own
life because of a deep-seated self-hatred that stems from feeling inauthentic. After his
death, Neil realizes that all people experience themselves as fraudulent-and that the
feeling is only logical: "Of course you're a fraud, of course what people see is never you.
And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you
know it's only a part. Who wouldn't?" (179). Much of Wallace's writing, most
importantly his opus Infinite Jest, focuses on the loneliness of human experience in the
contemporary world. As philosopher Charles Taylor notes, in our more secular,
contemporary society, personal authenticity-being internally and externally consistentreplaces a belief in sets of moral imperatives. For Taylor, this moral relativism "reflects
what we could call the individualism of self-fulfillment, which is widespread in our times
and has grown particularly strong in Western societies since the 1960s" (14). However,
both Taylor and Wallace express the concept that human life contains a tremendous
multiplicity of voices, beliefs, and relationships. We are not able to present the whole
spectrum of our personal experience to other people at once. Striving toward true
authenticity and an absolute individualism leads to separation and isolation because we
can never express a perfect authenticity to another person.

Date of Award	2015
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	Eastern Illinois University
Supervisor	Lania Knight (Supervisor)