David Foster Wallace's The Devil Is A Busy Man

David Foster Wallace’s The Devil Is a Busy Man begins with the sentence “Three weeks ago, I did a nice thing for someone” and begins again the conversation that echoes throughout the rest of his book, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, about the narcissistic nature of man. This story which qualifies the authenticity and “value” of a good deed based on its anonymity does so under the idea that if a good deed is made public by someone who did the deed then it was done more for one’s own personal benefit rather than any altruistic purpose. The nameless, sexless narrator then goes through an existential crisis in which they think that subconsciously they set the situation and acted in such a way as to allow him or her to be caught. Throughout …show more content…
Burn chapter six written by Mary K. Holland and entitled “Mediated Immediacy in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” Holland states that in this text Wallace “…continues his rejection of postmodernism’s unproductive irony in favor of a return to sincerity through metafiction.” (107) Acceptance of the idea that Wallace wishes to attack narcissism with sincerity through narcissism and metafiction is necessary to understanding the idea of the devil, or evil, as nonexistent or an absence rather than the opposite of good. This sincerity can be seen through the entirety of the collection, to be referred to as Brief Interviews from now on, in the callousness of the men it tells the tales of. This includes both “the linguistic contortions men undergo to make the physical ones happen” (Holland 107-108) and the simple frankness in which sex and traditionally taboo portions of human anatomy are discussed. Specifically in The Devil Is a Busy Man this sincerity is seen in the insincerity of the narrator which while trying to explain their unconscious move towards what they describe as evil they repeat this narcissistic tendency that goes against the humility the narrator sees as necessary for …show more content…
Those being helped, who should be the most important individuals in the situation, are not the main concern of the narrator, his own goodness is. They do not care if the deed is anonymous and its anonymity does not help them. The narrator is instead obsessed with bettering themselves through pain and does this both in ensuring anonymity and explaining their own shortcomings. Evident throughout BI that there were three issues Wallace explores, the first of which “is how to be human in a contemporary society that prefers to see us as things, in which we are encouraged to see others as things and to think of ourselves as things.”(McLaughlin 334) The narcissism is not a momentary flaw of character but something ingrained in human society and the human