Against Trauma: Boredom and Obsession in David Foster Wallace's Oblivion

This essay examines two short stories by David Foster Wallace from his final collection, Oblivion. Both are narratives of violent events (a suicide in "Good Old Neon" and a school shooting in "The Soul is Not a Smithy"), and in each case the narrator comes into conflict with the medical authorities diagnosing them. Wallace's writing of this period has been identified by critic Thomas Tracey as "representations of trauma," a reading borne out by the stories' temporal fragmentation and narrative lacunae. I argue that these tropes of trauma writing are deployed ironically, and highlight instances in each story wherein trauma is undermined as an explanatory narrative of the protagonists' suffering. Such a reading not only opens up new avenues in Wallace studies but also raises important questions surrounding medical diagnosis and the value of patient narrative, even a misinformed one, as a diagnostic tool.