The reason all these accounts of what Wallace is doing are inadequate is that they fail to fully appreciate the enormity of our predicament. What the postmodern posture reveals is not a deficit of belief, but rather an unwillingness to open ourselves up to the kind of vulnerability entailed in betraying true belief. There is a sick cycle at work in our culture, which Wallace’s fiction has identified: (stay with me here) as Americans, we share a basic and formative fear of being alone, but we exist in a culture that compels us to be ironic and cynical to earn inclusion, so we adopt a posture of ironic distance, which itself, by diminishing the meaning and limiting the possibility of real, open, mutually-vulnerable communication, precludes the formation of the kinds of community that would actually assuage our loneliness. As Westward’s numinous ad exec J.D. Steelritter explains, it is precisely our “solipsism” that “binds us together.” But of course, the whole point of solipsism is that we can’t see everybody else suffering along with us in exactly the same way. And thus, Mark Nechtr’s “special delusion” that “he’s the only person in the world who feels like the only person in the world.”