While much of this is on the money, I feel compelled to point out here that Scott’s analysis employs one of the more classically unfair, not to mention outdated, maneuvers in literary criticism—i.e. assuming that whenever an author convincingly renders a particular human insecurity, deficiency, or delusion, she herself must, to some degree, share that flaw with her character. This is like assuming that Dostoevsky must have seriously contemplated committing murder in order to conjure Raskolnikov. On the other hand, Wallace’s fiction exhibits an intimate awareness of the alienating consequences of ironic sham-honesty. His literary preoccupation with the ways in which self-consciousness can become an inescapable trap, along with his candid nonfiction meditations on the problem, like his 2006 Kenyon College commencement speech, do suggest that he suffered from the sickness he so astutely diagnosed. In fact, the sharpness with which he describes the problem and the compassion and eloquence of the strategies he proposes for dealing with it, suggest he may have been sicker than any of us.[15] Where Scott is wrong, I think, is to assume that Wallace’s writing, which often mimetically depicts the most advanced symptoms of the disease, is itself sick. Rather, I think Wallace’s fiction, if nothing else, represents one of the most sincere and painstaking efforts in contemporary literature to unsettle our “default setting”—the natural solipsistic narcissism that imprisons each of us inside our heads.
One way that Wallace goes about this unsettling, both in Westward and “E Unibus Pluram,” is to deny the postmodern assumption that “cynicism and naiveté” are mutually incompatible. Which is to say, he challenges us to acknowledge that we can be hip, world-weary, ironically knowing, and still be scared shitless of misunderstanding, of being misunderstood, of being utterly and terribly alone. Lee Konstantinou, of the Legacy of… crowd, inverts this concept to suggest that Wallace wants his reader to “adopt a stance of non-naïve non-cynicism,” which he (i.e. Konstantinou) calls an ethic of ‘post-ironic belief.’ Wallace uses fiction, in this view, as a “last desperate effort to make us believe something, to feel anything.”
[15] From the Kenyon speech: “everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth.”