So I’m a big David Foster Wallace fan, which is something I haven't written much about directly. In fact, I have read all of his books, which could definitely be seen as a red flag. A reason I haven’t written about him before is that oftentimes when thinking about DFW, you have to super over-intellectualize everything or be seemingly condescending (perhaps that’s writing about DFW in general?), or really break out the thesaurus (see the DFW subreddits). Well, I feel like I want to write about DFW - but I’m not going to overdo it or write a dissertation. This is simply going to be about why I like and how I read DFW and how I think this is explicitly linked to navigating the world as a neurodivergent person. Thesis: DFW’s specific lens of writing is compatible with the neurodivergent experience - specifically that ADHD type of ND. I think that as someone who has recently determined his own place on the spectrum, DFW is able to connect to those feelings of alienation and disconnection in a really relevant way. This is why perhaps neurodivergent people (see, myself) might be drawn to his writing. But I’m not going to overthink it or anything, I’m just going to try and write it as straightforwardly as possible, and only do a quote when necessary. So here we go.
The central concern of all of DFW’s work (imo) is how one can connect with something
other than themselves, how to escape one’s own head. If you’re not familiar with DFW, then watch the “This is Water Speech”. As cliché as a suggestion might be, I think that does a solid job of summarizing the main deal in his oeuvre, and it serves as a starting point for a lot of his readers (including myself). There are way too many themes in his work, but I think fundamentally DFW’s central concern is the inability for one person to escape one’s own head and exist and feel in the world. This is explicitly expressed in the opening scene of Infinite Jest as Hal Incandeza at a college interview, his head filled with knowledge and emotion and everything, but when he tries to communicate all he can make is animal sounds. And this experience is not unlike the autistic experience - where someone can possess loads of knowledge but fails as if they cannot express that through the means of language*.
Everything else that DFW writes about is the obstacles that prevent someone from connecting with something outside of themselves; these obstacles being institutional (politics, entertainment, work), existential (religion, addiction), or even metaphysical (language, sense of self, mathematics). These barriers effectively break his characters; either they become consumed by the barrier or the character “breaks”. Oftentimes we are unaware of the result of this breaking, and the “break” and the assumed aftermath are what end DFW’s stories. I’ll quote "This is Water" where “everything [you worship] will eat you alive”, worship being used in this sense as becoming obsessed with or consumed by. Also, I’m pretty sure this was one of the central themes of Broom in the System; however, I genuinely don’t remember all the details too well because I didn’t really like it all that much. You see so many of his characters be unable to handle the world because they are so consumed by something else or existing only in their heads.
So much of the discourse around DFW is, I think, misguided because DFW is often seen as over-intellectualization and heady, and he’s not necessarily linked to emotions or feeling, when I think that DFW’s writing is extremely emotional, it's basically being in-practice alienation and the emotional weight of that. The emotional weight of alienation.
There are so many moments in DFW's works where people are trying to connect but failing. In Infinite Jest, there’s a character who is desperately trying to have someone simply touch him (not sexually, just real human touch) while dressed as a homeless person. The character has a sign that says "someone please touch my hand", and he ends up making a lot of money because they think it’s such a clever gimmick, but that makes him ultimately more depressed because it shows how people are viewing this desperate expression of wanting human connection as entertainment rather than an existential plea. Another example is “In the Girl with the Curious Hair”, there is a character who is trying to understand the American-psycho-esque narrator. The character is depressed because he cannot understand why the narrator is the way he is, and that inability to connect is terrifying. To be fair, the narrator of that story has nothing going on except violence - he, in essence, has been someone who has been consumed.
The other key theme present in DFW’s work is “information overload”. Infinite Jest is essentially about how we navigate the world with so much stuff, entertainment, content, etc. The Pale King is all about extremely mundane information, but under that banality is some semblance of “truth”. And the reading experience of DFW is often information overload - you are given so much stuff, between details, words, footnotes, characters, etc. But under this information, there is the “truth” or the core, what DFW is trying to say, some deep emotional element. His writing style directly reflects his core theme: how can one emotionally connect to something when there are so many barriers to connection. And I think this reading experience reflects living with neurodivergence - information can be overwhelming, one might hyperfixate on irrelevant information, etc., etc. And in fact, I think that being neurodivergent actually helps one’s ability to read his work because we naturally are able to “filter out” unnecessary information so often in our day-to-day lives, so reading DFW feels natural to how one navigates the world.
I think DFW’s concerns are often about the “autistic experience” - whether he acknowledges this or not (again I’m not doing a deep dive here - but I feel like there is resistance to his own neurodivergence, but both in his autobiographical text, there is a lot of neurodivergent coding). I don’t want to misrepresent his experience with neurodivergence (clearly, I am projecting a lot) - but I don’t think it’s a surprise that explicitly autistic (see Expressionless Little Animals) or autistic-coded characters (Hal Incandenza again, and the last long chapter in the Pale King). If hyperfixation is a trait of neurodivergency, then DFW’s writing style and interest profile match that perhaps a little too directly.
Anyway, to summarize this - the literary work of DFW is what I think is the best-written example of what it means to feel like a neurodivergent person through the written themes, and the work itself mirrors a neurodivergent experience because of the hoops that you need to go through in order to approach it (e.g. way too much information, repetition, footnotes). And consequently, a neurodivergent person might be drawn to his work because he is able to accurately discuss the feelings of alienation, disconnection, and associated feelings.
*Ironically, I feel this very deeply at the moment because I feel as if I am failing to communicate my thoughts in this post (and trust me, it did take effort