David Foster Wallace's Craft | Research

David Foster Wallace’s sentences are easy to recognize and easy to imitate badly. The footnotes, recursive qualifications, technical vocabulary, and sudden changes of register are surface features. Their value depends on the problem they are solving: how to write sincerely after irony has made every sincere gesture look naive.

Irony Can Expose but Not Repair

In “E Unibus Pluram,” Wallace describes irony as an effective tool for exposing hypocrisy. The trouble begins when exposure becomes the permanent stance. A writer who always keeps one eyebrow raised can criticize anything without becoming vulnerable enough to propose a replacement.

Irony is “singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace” what it exposes. —David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram”

Wallace’s imagined “new rebels” would risk direct feeling even when readers might call it sentimental or banal. This was not a rejection of irony. His own work remained deeply comic and self-aware. It was an argument for using irony as a tool rather than treating distance as a complete worldview.

That tension never disappears from his work. A sincere sentence can become another performance of sincerity; a joke about that performance creates another layer of distance. The writing keeps both risks visible.

Footnotes as Structure

Wallace’s notes do several jobs:

They interrupt linear reading. A sentence opens a side thought, which opens another, before the main line resumes.
They stage information overload. The reader has to decide which channel deserves attention.
They make effort physical. In Infinite Jest, turning between the narrative and endnotes becomes part of reading the book.
They preserve digression. An essay can carry technical detail, objection, or comic aside without pretending it belongs to the main sequence.

These effects come with a cost. Notes divide attention and can turn the writer’s excess into the reader’s unpaid labor. The question is whether the interruption creates an experience the main text could not create more cleanly.

Copying the device without that reason produces only a visual resemblance to Wallace.

Maximalism With Local Precision

Wallace’s long sentences often contain several voices at once: formal analysis, advertisement, bureaucratic euphemism, private panic, and slang. Length lets those registers collide before the sentence resolves.

The useful craft lesson is not “write longer.” It is to give syntax a specific job. A long sentence can delay a conclusion, accumulate pressure, reproduce obsessive thought, or show a mind correcting itself in real time. When it does none of those things, length becomes drag.

The same test applies to specialized vocabulary. Precision sometimes requires an uncommon word. Status display does not.

The Reader Has a Life

In interviews and teaching materials, Wallace repeatedly treats writing as communication with an intelligent reader whose time and inner life matter. Expression alone does not complete the work. The draft must make its intended experience available to someone who was not present when it was written.

This principle complicates his maximalism. Difficult prose can respect a reader when the difficulty is part of the subject and the reward. It can also become vanity disguised as rigor. Wallace’s best work keeps testing that boundary.

Useful questions follow:

What experience does this formal difficulty create?
Could a simpler structure create the same effect?
Is the qualification necessary for accuracy, or is it fear of being caught?
Does the joke open the subject, or protect the writer from commitment?
Has the reader been given enough orientation to keep choosing the effort?

The Danger of Imitation

Wallace’s style turns its own failure modes into subject matter: vanity, self-consciousness, compulsive qualification, and the wish to be admired for intelligence. That makes imitation especially treacherous. A copy can reproduce the symptoms while losing the self-suspicion that gave them pressure.

Study the purpose beneath the feature:

Footnotes can represent divided attention.
Recursion can dramatize a mind unable to stop revising itself.
Technical language can expose the systems shaping ordinary life.
Direct sentiment can risk embarrassment after pages of defensive wit.

If the purpose is absent, remove the feature.

What to Read

Fiction: Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion, The Pale King

Essays: “E Unibus Pluram,” “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” “Consider the Lobster,” “Authority and American Usage”

Interviews: Larry McCaffery’s 1993 interview in the Review of Contemporary Fiction

Speech: “This Is Water” (Kenyon commencement, 2005)