Mario's night walk: the eye-roll rule

The anthology's manifesto-in-miniature, spoken through its one irony-free perceiver. Mario names the cultural rule with total precision: sincerity — "real stuff" — is admissible only if pre-emptively defused, taxed by an eye-roll or an unhappy laugh before it can be said aloud. Because Mario has no ironic organ, he sees the rule from outside, as a bizarre imposition rather than the water everyone else swims in; the whole issue is "far above Mario's head" not because he's slow but because he's the only one not subject to the rule. This is Wallace's diagnosis of U.S. address in a single sentence, and it is load-bearing that the diagnostician is the book's holy fool — only the un-ironic can perceive the compulsory irony as strange.