Oblivion: Stories (2004) is a collection of short fiction by the American writer David Foster Wallace. Oblivion is Wallace's third and last short story collection and was listed as a 2004 New York Times Notable Book of the Year. In the stories, Wallace explores the nature of reality, dreams, trauma, and the "dynamics of consciousness". The story "Good Old Neon" was included in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2002.
Composition and publication The collection's writing overlapped with Wallace's last novel, The Pale King;Boswell, Marshall. "'The Constant Monologue Inside Your Head': Oblivion and the Nightmare of Consciousness." In A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies. Eds. Stephen J. Burn and Marshall Boswell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print. 156 many of the stories came from notebooks Wallace used to write the book and may have begun as sections of it.Max, D.T. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story. New York: Viking Penguin, 2012. Print. 276
Wallace first suggested a new collection of stories to his editor Michael Pietsch in October 2001. Much of the editing appears to have been completed by October 2003.Max, D.T. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story. New York: Viking Penguin, 2012. Print. 276 Published in June 2004, the book sold 18,000 hardcover copies in its first year.Max, D.T. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story. New York: Viking Penguin, 2012. Print. 279
List of stories "Mister Squishy" was originally published as "Mr. Squishy" in McSweeney's #5 (2000), under the pseudonym Elizabeth Klemm. The story takes place in November 1995 and follows a focus group in a marketer's conference room and the group's facilitator, Terry Schmidt. The group is taste-testing a new chocolate snack named "Felonies!" while a person free climbs up the building's north face. "The Soul Is Not a Smithy" was originally published in AGNI #57 (2003). In his review of the collection, Scott M. Morris wrote that the story "may well be a masterpiece". The title apparently refers to James Joyce's novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which Stephen Dedalus writes: "Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." An unnamed narrator recounts his experience in his fourth-grade civics class in Columbus, Ohio. The substitute teacher, Mr. Johnson, has a psychotic breakdown, which results in a hostage crisis, but the narrator spends his time daydreaming and looking out of the classroom window. "Incarnations of Burned Children" was originally published in Esquire (November 2000). A baby is burned by boiling water. "Another Pioneer" was originally published in Colorado Review (Summer 2001). It is a fable about a Stone Age village in which a wise child can answer any question posed to him. "Good Old Neon" was originally published in Conjunctions #37 (November 2001). In his review of the collection, Chad Harbach called the story an "indisputable masterpiece". Marshall Boswell wrote that it is the collection's "best and most celebrated stand-alone story".Boswell, Marshall. "'The Constant Monologue Inside Your Head': Oblivion and the Nightmare of Consciousness." In A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies. Eds. Stephen J. Burn and Marshall Boswell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print. 155 It was included in O. Henry Prize Stories 2002. The story consists of the monologue of a lonely advertising executive, Neal, who commits suicide by crashing his car. Neal tells his psychiatrist about his fraudulence, deceptions, failures, and manipulations.Max, D.T. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story. New York: Viking Penguin, 2012. Print. 278 "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" was originally published, in slightly edited form, as "Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (VIII)" in McSweeney's #1 (1998). According to Paul Giles, the title "directly echoes" Richard Rorty's book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.Giles, Paul. "All Swallowed Up: David Foster Wallace And American Literature." In The Legacy of David Foster Wallace. Eds. Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012. Print. In the story, an unnamed narrator recounts the story of his mother's botched facial plastic surgery, which left her with a look of constant terror on her face, and the litigation surrounding that surgery. The narrator is also entangled in litigation related to his black-widow spider farm. "Oblivion" was originally published in Black Clock No. 1 (Spring 2004/Summer 2004). The narrator, Randall Napier, recounts his exhausting fight with his wife Hope over his alleged snoring, which she says keeps her awake at night. Randall protests, maintaining that he was awake and consequently unable to snore, while Hope was actually asleep. Eventually they travel to a sleep clinic to monitor their behaviors and determine who is right. "The Suffering Channel" is a novella set in July 2001. Its protagonist, Skip Atwater, is a journalist who works for the fictional Style Magazine at the World Trade Center. Atwater is attempting to write an article about a midwestern artist, Brint Moltke, whose excrement reportedly resembles famous cultural objects, for the September 10, 2001, issue of Style.
Critical reception The book was met with a "familiar duality" in its reviews, receiving a mixture of both extremely positive and negative reviews.Max, D.T. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story. New York: Viking Penguin, 2012. Print. 279
In Time, Joel Stein wrote that the "breathtakingly smart" stories are "epic modernism", with "big plots, absurd Beckettian humor and science-fiction-height ideas portrayed vis-a-vis slow, realistic stream of consciousness." In The San Diego Union-Tribune, Jan Wildt wrote that Oblivion argues convincingly "that the short story is [Wallace's] true fictional metier" and that Oblivion "puts his stylistic idiosyncrasy to better use than any of its predecessors". In Salon, Laura Miller wrote that Wallace had "perfected a particularly subtle form of horror story" and that his "long arcs of prose and the narrative sidetracks are exposed not as tortuous strivings toward some hard-won truth but as an insulation that people spin between themselves and the sharp edges of their condition." In the Los Angeles Times, Scott M. Morris wrote that Wallace had "earned a place as one of America's most daring and talented young writers". Morris said that though some of the stories left the reader "more impressed with [Wallace's] intelligence than with the stories", with "'The Suffering Channel,' 'Mister Squishy' and 'The Soul Is Not a Smithy,' Wallace transcends mere dazzling displays and explores human emotions with sensitivity". Morris also wrote that in this collection "the high stakes of life have supplanted postmodern playfulness" and that "Wallace has laid down a marker that will be coveted by readers".
In n+1, Chad Harbach wrote that "apart from 'The Suffering Channel' and 'Good Old Neon', Oblivion has a casual feel", adding, "compared to the premeditated formal performances of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, his previous collection, much of Oblivion has a loose, tossed-off feel." In the London Review of Books, Wyatt Mason wrote that although the stories are "a bright array of sad and moving and funny and fascinating human objects of undeniable, unusual value", they still may have a "fundamental rhetorical failure" due to their difficulty. Nonetheless, Mason called Oblivion "the most interesting and serious and accomplished shorter fiction published in the past decade". In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote that Oblivion is dominated by "tiresome, whiny passages", and that though Wallace is a "prose magician", in Oblivion he "gives us only the tiniest tasting of his smorgasbord of talents. Instead, he all too often settles for the sort of self-indulgent prattling that bogged down his 1999 collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and the cheap brand of irony and ridicule that he once denounced in an essay as 'agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture'". James Wood also panned the collection in The New Republic, writing that "Mister Squishy" is "fundamentally unreadable" because Wallace too often "bloats his sentences with mimesis". "Above all", Wood wrote, "his immersionist's willingness to saturate his fictions in the germs that he is documenting makes them sick themselves". Wood called the collection as a whole "talented, frustrating, and finally intolerable", writing that the stories fail to "move the reader" because they "strangely reproduce the extreme coldness that they abhor."
In 2018, when Vulture.com gathered together a panel of prominent critics to choose the 100 most important books of the 21st century so far, Oblivion was among the books selected.
Analysis Criticism of Oblivion has involved attempts to discuss the collection as a whole, in relation to other work by Wallace, and as individual stories. Marshall Boswell called Oblivion Wallace's "bleakest" work of fiction, writing that Wallace "uncharacteristically" provides "no way out" of solipsism and loneliness and "repeatedly undermines many of the techniques for alleviation" of loneliness, such as communication, that he presented in Infinite Jest. "Oblivion", Boswell wrote, "remains unique in Wallace's oeuvre in its unrelenting pessimism."Boswell, Marshall. "'The Constant Monologue Inside Your Head': Oblivion and the Nightmare of Consciousness." In A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies. Eds. Stephen J. Burn and Marshall Boswell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print. 151-168 D.T. Max wrote that the stories in Oblivion "seem afraid of compression, as if the title were a threat that could only be defended against by the relentlessly engaged consciousness."Max, D.T. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story. New York: Viking Penguin, 2012. Print. 277
Many critics have linked Oblivion to other works by Wallace, both fiction and nonfiction. Max said that many of the stories are "successors" to Brief Interviews with Hideous Men in that they are concerned "mostly with middle-aged, middle-class white men in middle America."Max, D.T. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story. New York: Viking Penguin, 2012. Print. 277 Others have called Oblivion and The Pale King companion texts. Max wrote that while Oblivion is descriptive of a lonely American society, The Pale King is prescriptive, suggesting a "way out of the bind".Max, D.T. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story. New York: Viking Penguin, 2012. Print. 280 Boswell also called The Pale King the "compositional companion" to Oblivion because both have themes of the management of "entropy" and "shit, art, death". But The Pale King can ultimately be seen as a "corrective, or at least dialectical partner, to Oblivions haunted insularity", Boswell wrote, also linking Oblivion to This Is Water, in that it depicts adults "hypnotized by the constant monologues" inside their heads, and to "Deciderization 2007", an essay that appears in Both Flesh and Not, in its concern with entropy and sorting data and a "surfeit of information".Boswell, Marshall. "'The Constant Monologue Inside Your Head': Oblivion and the Nightmare of Consciousness." In A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies. Eds. Stephen J. Burn and Marshall Boswell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print. 163-169 Tom Tracey wrote that "The Soul Is Not a Smithy" resembles The Pale King and recalls the philosophy of This Is Water in its discussion of attention and boredom.Tracy, Thomas. "Representations of Trauma in David Foster Wallace's Oblivion." In Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays. Ed. David Hering. Los Angeles: Sideshow Media Group Press, 2010. Print. 180