An Unresolved Crossing: David Foster Wallace’s ‘Oblivion’

Reading David Foster Wallace’s short story ‘Oblivion’ (2004) is a complex endeavor that requires readers to negotiate a generic border-crossing—between monologue and dialogue—and a thematic/typological one—between waking and dreaming. This latter contains a further embedded boundary concerning gender-related inflections of the self. These borders are not simply porous; they also lead to an unresolved crossing that does not end up in annihilation but produces an incessant movement. Through a close analysis of Wallace’s text, this chapter maps the back-pedaling across borders that the final page challenges readers to undertake to try and diffuse the numerous stubborn elements that emerge. What the chapter demonstrates is that ‘Oblivion’ invites us to navigate suffering, resistance, and forgetfulness by inhabiting the liminal dizzying space of being across borders, neither here nor there, but both here and there, handling events and emotions that are named through their being forgotten.