#85 Good Old Neon- David Foster Wallace

#85 Good Old Neon- David Foster Wallace

Another round of O.Henry (award winner) Friday, this one is from my favorite author David Foster Wallace. DFW was included in the annual Prize Stories collection three times, this one is from the 2002 O.Henry awards. 

Good Old Neon is the mental stream of a troubled man going through psycho-analysis. We learn early on that he will commit suicide so there isn’t much hope in this story, but there is intrigue. It reads like a lecture in an Ethics seminar discussing the philosophy of a paradox, the fraudulent paradox in fact. Can you fake being a fraud? If you could, wouldn’t that automatically make you a fraud?

“…I’d been fraudulent even in my pursuit of ways to achieve genuine and uncalculating integrity.”

“I just couldn’t see myself talking pills to try to be less of a fraud.”

“how frustrating it was to get just good enough to know what getting really good at it would be like but not being able to get that good.”

It has always been DFW’s strength to tap into the manner in which we think:

“I know that you know as well as I do how fast thoughts and associations can fly through your head.”

We can have a thousands of thoughts go through our head at any one moment and somehow, DFW will find a way to verbalize it, make it real, and have it make sense.

“This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person’s life are ones that flash through your head so fast that fast isn’t even the right word, they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another-word English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second’s flash of thoughts and connections, etc.”

“…and yet we all seem to go around trying to use [spoken language] to try to convey to other people what we’re thinking…deep down everyone knows it’s a charade…”

Speaking of paradoxes and DFW’s mathematical mind, did you know that “the very smallest number that can’t be described in under twenty-two syllables” can be described by using that previous sentence containing twenty-one syllables. I thought that was a fun aside that was thrown in.

The ultimate paradox about this piece is that by reading someone’s self-awareness about his own fraudulence, really about the fraudulence in all of the human psyche, we’re reading about as truthful a thing as I can imagine. 

Of course knowing that DFW was destroyed by his own mental problems, it is also heartbreaking to imagine that this was a glimpse of his own torment. And hearing DFW use a narrator to talk about his own suicide is unspeakably sad. Like what he says in here about the horror of knowing that his analyst isn’t smart enough to help him, all he wanted was somebody smart enough to disprove the logic of his own fraudulent paradox. With a mind like DFW, there simply wasn’t anyone out there smart enough to out-logic a genius.

Notable Passage: “The reality is that dying isn’t bad, but it takes forever. And that forever is no time at all."

Rating: Once again…Not Rate-able…it is unfair to compare DFW to anyone else. To do so I’d have to develop a whole new system.  He ruins the curve…so lets just say he gets a perfect score and move on.