It’s very difficult to avoid discussing the roles anxiety and depression play in David Foster Wallace’s fiction. Knowing what we know now about Wallace’s struggles with depression and what led to his suicide in 2008, it seems completely appropriate to discuss how he expresses the effects of anxiety and depression in his fiction.

In my quest to share my margin notes and highlights as I read The Pale King, I thought I’d start off by sharing this passage from page 95. In this section of the book, a character referred to as the boy (we’re unsure of which character this is at this point in the book) reflects on the crippling anxiety he faces in High School, which causes him to break into uncontrollable sweats:

At first glance, this passage appears comically. But reading further, it’s clear that Wallace sets up this characters’ anxiety as something human, something that all of us — any of us — have experienced or can experience.

Wallace describes that even the thought of sweating and attracting unwanted attention causes the boy to sweat more. He puts it this way:

Or it [sweat] also happened at any crowded function like Scout meetings or Christmas dinner in the stuffy, overheated dining room of his grandparents’ home in Rockton, where he could literally feel the table’s candles’ extra little dots of heat and the body heat of all the relatives crowded around the table, with his head down trying to look like he was studying his plate’s china pattern as the heat of the fear of the heat spread through him like adrenaline or brandy, that physical spread of internal heat that he tried so hard not to dread.

This passage, and its accuracy, blows me away, especially “the heat of the fear of the heat” line. Wow. That’s exactly what crippling anxiety can feel like. I’ve been there. I can feel it the way Wallace intended, and I can pull from my own experiences with anxiety while reading this passage yet feel comfort that another person feels this too.

These passages verify Wallace’s goal to make fiction more human and more “real” — not in the sense of realism but in the sense of feeling. And with that in mind, I think everyone needs to read or listen to Wallace’s Kenyon College commencement address from 2005, published as “This Is Water” and available on Youtube. Here’s the first part:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vET9cvlGJQw]

As I go through The Pale King, I’m struck with how complete Wallace presents these characters’ emotional lives. I find a deep compassion in DFW’s work, and I hope that as I delve further into my personal observations, you too will grasp some aspect of the compassionate nature of his work.