essay written for my Post-modern class about "Octet" (as part of Brief Interview with Hideous Men) by David Foster Wallace

The Unresolved Essay, Unresolving an Unresolved Essay

Essay:

Not to be too deep in my opening sentence, but think about this: life does not come in nicely outlined events with emotions that resolve to one whole emotion: happy, sad, mad, whatever. I would like to argue that life resolves when you die. Therefore, anything one can write about life can’t actually resolve completely, because unless everyone dies (like in Hamlet), there will still be characters from the story, continuing their lives within the alternate literary universe in which all literary constructs live together in eternal harmony because Voldemort was killed in the end (oops, passive voice). Or, literature can’t resolve because the person writing is human, who by their nature can’t resolve anything because their life is one big, unresolved inter-connected web of events that influence other events and therefore never end. For me, what unified the pieces in “Octet” by David Foster Wallace is the lack of resolution, the inevitable suspension of each vignette within a conflict or time.

1. Pop Quizzes 1-3: …
2. Pop Quiz 4: The drug addicts remain locked in terminal illness and even Wallace doesn’t know who dies; he poses the question: “Which one lived” (131).
1. This question doesn’t have a question mark, potentially suggesting that it isn’t meant to be answered; it isn’t a real question but just food for thought for the reader.
2. By asking “which one lived,” Wallace directs the readers’ attention away from resolution: death. We are left wondering not only who lived, but consequently, what that character did after the vignette ended. If Wallace had asked which one died, we would have gained a more explicit resolution to the vignette; junkie A dies, meaning there is a definitive end, at least for him, which translates into a more definitive end of the story.

                                                              i.      By saying “which one lived,” Wallace implies one of them dies, but never actually kills one of them. Wallace calls them “terminally ill,” but b/c they never die in the vignette, they are forever suspended in the text as “terminally ill.”

ATTENTION!

Just in case you were panicking:

******DO NOT PANIC!!!!111******

I will explain/analyze/do essay-y things with this evidence after I have presented all of it.

Now I shall continue…

3. Pop Quiz 5: There is no Pop Quiz 5. Maybe there never was one, but this leaves a hole in Wallace’s narrative, even if the hole is only in the number sequence. Therefore, his entire narrative becomes unfinished or unresolved.
1. This is different from not having 1-3, because at least you are starting the story somewhere and going from there as opposed to starting it and then skipping a chapter. It’s like Star Wars. No one freaked out that it started with 4, but if The Empire Strikes Back had never been made, there may have been a problem. (I can think of at least 5 people who would consider this a significant personal problem.)
4. Pop Quiz 6: 1st unresolved problem: We don’t know why X hates Y (I think Y is sleeping with X’s wife). 2nd unresolved problem: We don’t know why Y keeps coming back (cough to sleep with Mrs. X cough) Wallace even says: “In fact, the whole mise en scene here seems too shot through with ambiguity to make a very good Pop Quiz, it turns out” (134).
1. So, why include it?

                                                              i.      I’d answer this but I too am a confused human being just like Wallace.

2. What does make a good “Pop Quiz”

Pop Quiz: What is a “Pop Quiz”? – I think Wallace uses the term “Pop Quiz” for his vignettes to explicitly communicate that readers should respond to each vignette; each vignette poses a question that readers are meant to respond to. Maybe there is an answer to each scenario, like…who acted morally or immorally, or who is right or wrong. Maybe, maybe there is only 1 right answer to each “Pop Quiz.” Maybe, maybe, maybe there is no right answer or no answer at all; each “Pop Quiz” may just be giving the reader an opportunity to engage in thought and test (or quiz) their own analysis.        

5. Pop Quiz 7: In terms of the story of the mother and the trust fund, the scenario seems to have a resolution (the baby goes with the Dad), but Wallace poses a subjective question at the end: “is she a good mother” (135). Thus the story has an unresolved judgment call, left up to the reader, to attempt to answer or just muse over.
1. Again, no question mark.

                                                              i.      Wallace is my hero b/c I’m bad at punctuation and he makes me feel like all of my mistakes can in some post-modern-y way become intentional and deep and profound (like my absence of a period in this sentence, booya)

2. This question will never have an absolute resolution b/c it is so subjective; one would first have to decide what makes a good mother and then see if the mother in the story conforms to that subjective definition. Therefore, even if this question is answered, it can be answered differently by different people and thus can be debated until the end of time, meaning it would not have a resolution despite having many answers.

                                                              i.      Unless of course, the resolution in itself it that the question is doomed to be debated until the end of time…

6. Pop Quiz 6(a): X and Y come back because that story is soooooooooo  unresolved that even Wallace acknowledges that it needs to be rewritten, this time much longer and with the reader made to sympathize with X a bit more because he has the devil for a father-in-law and sh*t’s awkward. Despite the fact that the father-in-law dies, X is still upset, resenting his wife because he made her think he actually cared for his father-in-law but actually put himself through emotional stress and pain pretending so. Once again, Wallace asks the reader to “evaluate” (145) but not necessarily draw any conclusions. (The stuff in bold is my point, Wallace doesn’t even ask for a resolution in this one, just an evaluation.)
7. Pop Quiz 8: See #3 above.
8. Pop Quiz 9: This is where it starts to get cool. Wallace talks about writing a meta-fiction piece and outright asking the reader evaluate it, forcing the reader to look at the author as human: “fundamentally lost and confused and frightened and unsure about whether to trust even your most fundamental intuitions…” (160).
1. If the author is confused, the entire piece must be questioned, as Wallace asks his reader to do.

                                                              i.      To question the literature, however, may be somewhat futile considering that author himself is confused. Therefore, reading becomes more about experiencing uncertainty and confusion than trying to remedy it; even if the reader came to a resolution, because Wallace is still confused, the reader’s resolution is not what Wallace intended. In other words, the reader is not going to solve Wallace’s problems for him.

1.      The reader may be able to come up with some cool and interesting and inspiring ideas as they read, however, these ideas would be nothing more than mere ideas and would not reach Wallace’s intention seeing as he doesn’t even understand is own intentions.

2. Something else to prove my point and hopefully witty.
3. Do you have anything to add?

WE MADE IT! This is where I start really analyzing, as opposed to not really analyzing.

Ready, set, go!

Why not resolve anything?

 Interpretation X:

                                                                        By not bringing each vignette to a neat, clean, clear conclusion, Wallace mirrors not necessarily the chaos of postmodern life: “Oh my god, life is crazy and fragmented!” Instead, he mirrors the nature of life in general; being born is our beginning and dying is our end in the mortal world (I will not discuss the afterlife in this paper).  Therefore, anything that happens in between never actually “ends” because it inevitably causes some other thing. The influence of 1 event is infinite within a lifetime because as it influences 1 thing, that thing influences another. For example: I am sad today because my ankle hurts. We think that this situation will be resolved when my ankle feels better, but this situation leads to me not practicing ultimate Frisbee. Thus, this weekend when we have a tournament, because I couldn’t practice, I get less playing time which makes me resent that I was injured and start taking it out on my coach who didn’t play me as much and on and on and on. My point is that there are no self-contained events in life; everything is a chain reaction. Life itself is the only self-contained event: from birth to death. Therefore, by writing vignettes that don’t try to be self-contained, Wallace can more honestly depict the nature of life as inherently and necessarily unresolved.

Interpretation Q:

            As Wallace comments on the author as being confused and lost, by not resolving the content of his literature, he may be showing the unresolved nature of an author’s mind. Instead of pretending to know what he is writing about and creating a tight plot with a clear moral or meaning or what have you, he honestly creates fragmented and unfinished pieces, showing the reader what is actually in his mind and posing questions either in earnest or just because they are floating around in his head and, hey, he might as well express them.

Can we resolve anything?

            If we accept my above interpretation, even if Wallace wanted to completely resolve a literary piece, he wouldn’t be able to unless everything ended in death or nothingness (or ice like in Cat’s Cradle). Every character left alive could have a future, almost like potential energy; any character created by the author that is not terminated is therefore still living, if only suspended in the story. Furthermore, even if one character dies, their death creates experiences in other characters and thus although death may be a resolution for the individual that dies, in order for death to be a resolution to an entire piece of literature, every single thing must die or disappear or turn into ice. Additionally, any idea created by the author radiates out of the text, never ceasing to exist but growing more and more as people read and interpret it. In other words, because text transcends mere symbols on a page but can live in a human mind as ideas, the end of a literary work or form is not actually the end of its contents. Therefore, not only will the literature be unresolved, but if Wallace’s mind is perpetually unresolved/confused, he may not be able to write anything that does resolve. Or can he? I’m not really sure.

Do we even know what resolution means?

InterpretationJ:

            On the other hand, this text does have a literal beginning and end. Therefore, even though the content is unresolved, the physical text does end. Maybe we need to challenge what we consider a resolution. As of now, I would consider a resolution to be death, an ultimate end, or a perfect answer, like an axiom, something that unmistakably just is that we can depend on. I would consider a resolution to apply to content. Maybe we cannot look at resolution as such an extreme or a construct of content but instead as simply where the author finishes his last sentence; resolution may be a construct of form.

Maybe there aren’t absolute resolutions besides death, but what about subjective resolutions?

           Wallace ends “Octet” with the sentence: “So decide” [160]. Considering that Wallace indents this sentence, one can read it as separate from what immediately precedes it. Thus, his concluding message is an imperative: be decisive, figure something out for yourself. However, because he states this as an imperative, he seems to be speaking to the reader as an individual and therefore allowing an individual to draw some sort of conclusion. Furthermore, because decisions are subjective, Wallace allows the reader to come to their own resolution.

Does this mean that Wallace never had a resolution in mind? Maybe. Or, Wallace may have his own resolution and doesn’t want to share it with the reader. Or, or, Wallace’s resolution may be to pass the responsibility of a resolution onto others, paying it forward in a sense (great book, crappy movie). Whatever Wallace is intending or not intending, by putting this statement at the end, he allows for the form of the text to end with the content; the content ending as we see to it.

So decide.

           

….you knew I was gonna do that.