The impossibility of sharing pain — communication-solipsism at monologue length

echoes

Early text: "The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror." [opening]; the Support System telephony — after each long-distance call she sits "listening to the empty apian drone of the dial tone and feeling even more isolated and inadequate and contemptible than she had before she’d called" [mid]; the ending's discovery that "she could neither feel nor identify any real feelings within herself for the therapist", closing on "such a solipsistic, self-consumed, endless emotional vacuum and sponge as she now appeared to herself to be" [close].
IJ echo: IJ's solipsism-and-connection problem — Kate Gompert's inability to make her depression legible to the ward; the AA insistence that isolation is the addict's/depressive's killer; the novel's pervasive doubt that one consciousness can reach another. The story is Wallace's most unrelieved single instance: a whole psyche whose reaching-out is itself the mechanism of its isolation.
Weight: restatement (oeuvre-scoped)