The David Wallace coda — author-into-character, and the autobiographical technique the IJ reading imputes

echoes

Early text: "David Wallace blinks in the midst of idly scanning class photos from his 1980 Aurora West H.S. yearbook" and, "through the tiny little keyhole of himself," tries to imagine "what all must have happened to lead up to my death in the fiery single-car accident" [final ¶]; "David Wallace having emerged from years of literally indescribable war against himself with quite a bit more firepower than he’d had at Aurora West" — the classmate/author, self-described in the third person, ending on the command "almost aloud, ‘Not another word.’" [final ¶].
IJ echo: Not IJ-internal evidence — a technique exhibit: a proven, on-the-page instance of Wallace inserting his named self into his fiction to gloss a damaged, luminous surrogate. The ij-autobiographical reading (in the archive's theory record — post-2008 the autobiographical reading became central) and hal-dfw-surrogate (Hal as the Wallace stand-in) attribute exactly this method to IJ; the coda demonstrates the method is Wallace's own, not only the critics'.
Weight: documentary (technique exhibit)