Forging in the Smithy of David Foster Wallace’s Postmodern Soul

Although recent criticism has argued for the emergence of the “new atheist novel” over the claims of religion, Stephen J. Burn writes that “much post-postmodern fiction seems to yearn for at least a partial return to religion and spirituality” and that “a distillation of this impulse is also palpable in the heightened resonance the word soul carries in much post-postmodern fiction.” This chapter proposes to illustrate this “return of the soul” in turn-of-the-century fiction by focusing on David Foster Wallace’s “metaphysical ache,” his several attempts to convert to Catholicism, his revisitation of Hamlet’s ghost in the burlesque creation of a filmmaker wreath in Infinite Jest and his “underworld” dialogue with James Joyce in one of his short stories entitled “The Soul Is Not a Smithy.”