The emotional solipsist and the "great self" — the cage-of-the-self critique in Wallace's own voice
echoes
From: Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think
- Early text: Updike's protagonists are "deeply alone, alone the
way only an emotional solipsist can be alone"; "The very world around them,
as gorgeously as they see and describe it, tends to exist for them only
insofar as it evokes impressions and associations and emotions and desires
inside the great self."; and the generational diagnosis — "anomie and
solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying
without even once having loved something more than yourself." [the
GMN-diagnosis and subforties ¶¶] [e-text]
- IJ echo: IJ's sealed interiority — Marathe's image of being "chained in
a cage of the self" (digest, pp. 774–779); Hal's locked-in consciousness;
the addicts' self-absorption the AA program and Mario's sincerity are set
against. The "dying without even once having loved something more than
yourself" line is the review's closest brush with the Marathe–Steeply
attachment/worship debate — the novel's argument that a self with nothing
larger to love is exactly what the Entertainment preys on.
- Weight: restatement (oeuvre-scoped)