The Myth of the Human w/an online forum David Foster Wallace's 'Mister Squishy'

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TL;DR

A close, associative reading of Wallace's Oblivion story "Mister Squishy" by the novelist Blake Butler (HTMLGiant, 2010). Its subject is a non-Infinite Jest story; it touches the novel only through shared Wallace preoccupations (the self as a managed image, the advertising apparatus that manufactures wanting) and through Butler's biography as a reader — he says he "pretty much begun writing fiction as a direct byproduct of reading Infinite Jest". It argues no reading of Infinite Jest itself.

Key claims

First encounter and pseudonymous publication. Butler recalls first reading "Mister Squishy," "published under the name Elizabeth Klemm in the 5th issue of McSweeney's in 2000," as a formative shock — "some odd confabulation of provocation, confusion, inundated awe" — having already begun writing "as a direct byproduct of reading Infinite Jest".
The self as chosen reflection. Reading Terry Schmidt, the story's focal market-researcher, Butler's central formulation: "The self reflects the self the self chooses to reflect, and that is who he is, to him." Identity in the story is a series of "poses" — "Minute orchestrations of self in carrying the self."
Advertising as the manufacture of wanting. He fastens on the story's short sentence "Advertising is not voodoo": want is produced not by dictation "but by inspiration, by becoming" — the corporate machinery builds selves, not just desires.
The buried David-Wallace cipher. Butler notes the story plants the Good Old Neon phrase — a figure "having emerged from years of literally indescribable war against himself" — and pairs the letter-counts: "Terry Schmidt, 5 letters and 7 letters. David Wallace, 5 letters and 7 letters", reading an authorial self-portrait smuggled into the corporate narrator.

Themes

The self as managed image; advertising and manufactured desire; the hidden authorial presence in the third-person voice; consumer capitalism and interior life — Wallace preoccupations that recur in Infinite Jest's figurant/attention material without Butler drawing the line to the novel.

Cross-references

ismail-consciousness-oblivion — the other Oblivion appreciation among these sources; both find genuine vulnerability under the collection's corporate sheen, and both single out Good Old Neon's language.
benzon-mister-squishy and smart-mister-squishy — other readings of the same story.
The "self as chosen reflection" / advertising-manufactures-wanting reading is a Mister Squishy analogue to the archive's Entertainment-and-attention concerns (offered here as thematic kinship, not an IJ claim).

Notable passages

"The self reflects the self the self chooses to reflect, and that is who he is, to him."
"Advertising is not voodoo."
"Terry Schmidt, 5 letters and 7 letters. David Wallace, 5 letters and 7 letters".