Analysis: Brief Interviews With Hideous Men By David Foster Wallace

Scatology and Lack of Symmetry:
Study on David Foster Wallace's [Brief Interviews with Hideous Men]

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1.Introduction Interviews without questions -- or more precisely, with hidden questions -- consists large part of [Brief Interviews with Hideous Men]. 18 in at least 59 of the unilateral narrations of "hideous men" are inserted among 17 short stories at random order. Only a letter "Q" or two and variable periods(.) indicate that there are some questions. The Interviewees are basically young men and the interviewer is not the same person in each interview. All the works focus on one figure, who is "hideous" in a sense: some of them are literally ugly, some are "pathetic," the others are mentally obsessive, and many
She had some traumatic experience in the past, one of which is concerning her divorced parents when she was a child. The parents "used her[the depressed person] as a pawn in the sick games they played"(ibid) and the parents' trouble is their "[sick] inability to communicate and share honestly and work their sick, dysfunctional issues with each other"(Wallace 48). Though the depressed person claims the cause of her depression cannot be attributed to her parents' battle over a matter on her health(39), she certainly had to undertake their mental difficulty or sickness. The game is a metaphor of the parents' dispute in which one only tries to gain superiority to the other under the excuse of their daughter's sake. The role the depressed person had played in her parents' disputes is described as "absorber of shit"(47) and "coprophagous services"(ibid). Then, the depressed person,whose traumas are awaken in a psychoanalytic group therapy, "shrieks obscenities," and the fit is called "cathartic tantrum." This makes a certain turning point of her journey toward
The city Thebes, where Oedipus becomes the king, is prevailed with plaque and impurity because of none other than Oedipus's sin of patricide. To purify the impurity there is no means other than to ostracise the murderer, according to the oracle. Finally Oedipus, knowing the truth, takes all the impurity on himself and leaves the city. The impurity which is prevailing in the city, is called [miasma] in Greek. This is the same word that happened to be used to describe the working environment of the father in B.I.#48. The narrator confesses his ambivalent emotion toward his father in the line :"Or do I despise him, you're wondering, feel disgust, contempt for any man who'd stand effaced in that [miasma] and dispense towels for coins?"(Wallace 91, emphasis mine) Unlike the drama of Sophocles, miasma here is not brought by a heroic individual like King Oedipus. The odor of excrement of all the users and aromatic are the component of miasma. In there, some of the users of lavatory go through catharsis, in a sense of diarrhoea, leaving the smell and take nothing. The father, who is most contaminated in the miasma, is the figure who cannot be ostracised. Even though he goes home every day, he inevitably go back to his job next