David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is his second short story collection, published in 1999. It includes twenty-three pieces in total; among them are four one-sided conversations with men, titled “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” who believe they’re telling the truth.
This article attempts to revisit each story, some well-discussed, some rarely touched, with fresh scrutiny.
Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XXIV)
Publication History and Variant Versions
David Foster Wallace wrote several brief pieces under the “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders” banner, which appeared in the late 1990s before being collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999). These vignettes were originally published in eclectic venues, often with different numbering or titles. For instance, a piece numbered (VIII) ran in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #1 (1998), and one labeled (VI) appeared in McSweeney’s #3 (1999) with the descriptive subtitle “Projected But Not Improbable Transcript of Author’s Parents’ Marriage’s End, 1971.” Several of these pieces were later revised or retitled: notably, the story originally known as “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (VIII)” was renamed “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” (after Richard Rorty’s famous 1979 philosophical critique) and republished in Wallace’s Oblivion collection (2004). The Oblivion version, often referred to by critics simply as “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,” is essentially an extended iteration of the “Porousness” theme. (Conversely, another piece, “(XII),” first ran in Esquire (Nov 1998) and was retitled “The Devil Is a Busy Man” when folded into Brief Interviews.) The final story in Brief Interviews – “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XXIV)” – did not appear elsewhere prior to the book, but it implicitly completes this loose series of numbered vignettes. Wallace’s playful numbering (skipping to XXIV with only a few earlier examples ever published) is a metafictional wink: it suggests an incomplete sequence, inviting readers to imagine a larger cycle of “Porous Borders” stories that exist off the page. Critics note that this inconsistent numeration – scattering a few installments like VI, XI, XII, XXI, XXIV – encourages “conflicting interpretations” about what the “borders” and their porousness signify, since so many supposed parts of the series are absent. In effect, Wallace leaves it to us to fill in the gaps, both literally (between the numbered titles) and figuratively (in understanding the thematic links).
Notably, “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” (the Oblivion version of (VIII)) has attracted its own commentary. It is a first-person narrative about a mother whose botched plastic surgery leaves her face frozen in a look of constant terror. This piece shares the “porous borders” motif in a more explicit way: the mother’s face becomes a permeable boundary between inner feeling and outer expression. Her horrified visage does not match her internal state, yet it influences how others treat her and how she sees herself, thereby functioning as a “mirror” of identity in the social world. Wallace’s decision to retitle (VIII) after Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature underscores the story’s concern with reflection, representation, and the limits of understanding oneself through mirrors (or others’ perceptions). Critics have even observed that “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” deliberately echoes Flannery O’Connor’s classic “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” another story of a son accompanying his mother on bus rides to town. Like O’Connor’s tale, Wallace’s piece stages a fraught mother–son relationship in public spaces, highlighting generational tension and the difficulty of truly seeing one another. One reader has pointed out that O’Connor’s story (titled after a Teilhard de Chardin aphorism about convergence) thematically contrasts with Rorty’s more ironic, anti-essentialist “mirror” metaphor – suggesting that Wallace’s choice of title may be a conscious counterpoint to O’Connor, inserting Wallace’s ongoing philosophical conversation about truth and empathy into the intertextual mix.
In sum, “Porousness (XXIV)” is part of a mini-cycle that Wallace wove through his stories of the period, resurfacing under different guises. Understanding this context – including the Oblivion incarnation “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” – allows us to see how Wallace revisited the same core ideas across different publications. The next sections examine what those core ideas are, as identified by critics in literary journals, books, and online essays.
Themes of Self-Consciousness, Identity, and Performativity
Critics overwhelmingly read “Porousness (XXIV)” as a potent meditation on self-consciousness and identity formation. The story’s basic scenario is simple but symbolically charged: a young boy is getting a haircut from his mother in the kitchen, while his identical twin brother hides just in the boy’s line of sight and mimics every facial expression the boy makes. The boy becomes intensely distressed as he watches his own faces – his emotions – parroted and distorted by the grinning twin. In effect, he is forced to see himself from the outside, as a grotesque caricature. According to a study guide summary, “all that is distressing the boy is seeing his own emotions reflected back at him.” This reflective dynamic epitomizes the “porous border” of the title: the boundary between self and other turns permeable, as the boy’s inner feelings cross over onto the mocking face of his twin, and then back into the boy’s self-image.
Scholars like Sergio López-Sande argue that Wallace uses this simple conceit to explore how one’s sense of self can be fundamentally altered – even harmed – by the gaze or feedback of another. In an academic article for the Journal of the Short Story in English, López-Sande points out that many of the “Porous Borders” stories involve “self-awareness as prompted by the other’s bedeviling perspective on the self.” In “(XXIV)” especially, the protagonist suddenly develops a hyperacute self-consciousness “by means of experiencing the Other before him,” finding in the other’s face “a source of insurmountable self-hatred.” The child’s innocent sense of self is corrupted the moment he grasps how someone else (even his own brother) sees and imitates him. The story thus dramatizes the emergence of what psychologists might call the “looking-glass self” – the idea that we form our identity in part by internalizing others’ perceptions. Here that process is rendered painfully literal: the boy cannot bear the sight of himself as seen by the other, and he effectively has an identity crisis in the span of a few minutes. By the end, he goes emotionally numb, fixing his face into a defeated “blank, slack” mask. In a final line (a single-sentence paragraph) the narrator declares “No not ever again.” – a haunting, ambiguous conclusion that suggests the boy has been traumatized into permanent self-consciousness (or perhaps a permanent guarding of his expressions). Several critics have noted that this ending reads like a kind of vow or “commissive speech act,” as if the boy is pledging never to let himself be so vulnerable again. The story, in other words, offers a grim origin story of self-conscious identity: one in which a child’s natural, unselfconscious “ipseity” (to use Paul Ricoeur’s term for mutable selfhood) suddenly collapses into a rigid “identity-idem,” a fixed self-image defined by others’ judgment.
This theme connects directly to Wallace’s broader concerns with performativity and authenticity. We see, in miniature, a version of the anxiety that haunts many of Wallace’s adult characters: the fear of being a fraud or of living behind a mask. Here the twin brother’s mimicry forces the boy into a kind of performance. The boy becomes acutely aware of his “facial performance” – those “faces” he had been unknowingly making – and, feeling scrutinized, he effectively shuts down and ceases to perform (adopting a neutral expression). In Wallace’s oeuvre, characters often oscillate between flamboyant self-display and self-erasure under the weight of self-consciousness. Critic Marshall Boswell observed that Brief Interviews as a whole is full of “acute self-consciousness” and interrogates whether genuine honesty is possible in a climate of performative social roles. The boy in “(XXIV)” experiences that dilemma on a visceral level: his “inner state” and his “presentation/style” no longer match. Interestingly, the blogger Philo on Books sensed that Porousness (XXIV) was “something having to do with being genuine or not, striking a pose for others or not, going into a shell or not, etc.” – even if he admitted he “didn’t get this story” fully on first read. That intuition aligns with academic readings: the story is about the pressure to strike poses and the retreat into one’s shell. It captures, in symbolic form, a moment of lost innocence where spontaneous emotion turns into a self-conscious performance under an outsider’s eye. As one critic put it in a different context, “the masks we wear to hide our hideousness” is a recurring theme throughout Brief Interviews – and in Porousness (XXIV) even a child is forced to confront his own “mask.”
Several commentators have linked the story’s treatment of self-consciousness with Wallace’s ongoing critique of solipsism and loneliness. In Brief Interviews, many characters are trapped in their own heads, unable to truly connect with others. “Porousness (XXIV)” literalizes why such connection is hard: because truly seeing oneself through another’s eyes can be harrowing. The boy’s twin is a mirror that offers not reassurance but ridicule. This notion resonates with other Wallace works. López-Sande points out that Wallace repeatedly explores “endless loops” of self-awareness and self-loathing across his fiction, from the fraud-feeling narrator of “Good Old Neon” to David Cusk’s profuse sweating in The Pale King. In each case, the person fears how others perceive them, which only intensifies the problem in a vicious cycle. In fact, critics have noted that the crying, panicking boy in “(XXIV)” closely parallels Wallace’s own youthful experiences with panic attacks, which “quickly became endless loops, where he worried that people would notice he was panicking, and that in turn would make him panic more”. This story, then, has been read not only as fiction but as psychological truth: a keen (if unsettling) insight into how performative anxiety and self-scrutiny can feed on themselves.
Psychological Violence and the “Gaze” – The Face as a Weapon
One striking element of “Porousness (XXIV)” is how critics have reframed the sibling prank in terms of violence and trauma. Though nothing “physically” violent occurs (no one touches the boy at all), scholars argue that the story depicts a form of psychological assault – essentially, identity trauma inflicted by a gaze. The twin brother’s copying game, in these readings, becomes an act of symbolic violence that injures the protagonist’s psyche. Sergio López-Sande’s analysis foregrounds this aspect: he notes that Wallace “scrupulously questions what manner of perspectival self-consciousness arises” when one realizes that “the face, in all its irreducible vulnerability as a token of our humanity, may turn into the very source from which the most traumatic forms of violence are able to spring.” In Levinas’s ethical philosophy, the human face is sacred – the face of the Other demands a response of empathy and non-violence. Wallace darkly subverts this idea: in “(XXIV)”, the Other’s face itself becomes a weapon. The brother’s contorted, leering face – which is effectively a funhouse mirror of the boy’s own face – delivers a devastating blow to the boy’s self-image. The “porous border” here is literally the boy’s emotional boundary, which the brother’s mocking expression penetrates and violates.
López-Sande interprets the twin’s mimicry as a species of identitarian violence: “sameness, and not otherness, is responsible for the pain of the subject – an unsolicited, artificial sameness [is] forced upon [him] in the form of compulsory misrecognition.” In other words, the brother forces an identity onto the protagonist (the identity of a “silly face” or an object of ridicule) by copying him, and this enforced sameness is deeply traumatic. The victim is made to misrecognize himself – to see a distorted “you are that” accusation in the twin’s parody. The normally invisible boundary between the two siblings collapses; they become “twinned” in a grotesque way that the protagonist cannot control. The article invokes the framework of Johan Galtung’s violence typology, suggesting that this kind of psychological harm qualifies as direct violence because it diminishes the boy’s mental potential and sense of self. Indeed, by the end the boy has been essentially “brainwashed” into seeing himself as repulsive and into silencing his own affect. His final internal collapse – “giving up the ghost completely for a blank slack gagged mask’s mindless stare” – testifies to the severity of the injury. The child’s lively identity has been bludgeoned into a “blank mask,” a chilling image of self-negation.
Critics also emphasize the asymmetry of power in this little drama. Only one side’s voice or perspective is ever given – the story is narrated entirely through the victim’s eyes, and we never get the mimicking brother’s inner thoughts or any maternal intervention. This narrative choice reinforces the theme of voicelessness and unilateral control. The mimicker’s facial “performance” dominates the exchange, while the main boy is struck dumb. In her book A Companion to DFW, Clare Hayes-Brady observes that silence and silenced figures (often female or vulnerable figures) are a recurring feature of Wallace’s work, tied to dynamics of power. Here, the silencing is literal: the boy cannot speak or even cry out effectively (he’s described as tearing up and choking on sobs). The violence of rhetoric (or of expression) is a Wallacean theme usually applied to the Hideous Men and their monologues , but in “(XXIV)” even a child can wield violent expression. The twin’s exaggerated grin and leer function as a one-way discourse that overwrites the protagonist’s identity. The critic Matt Alexander remarks that Brief Interviews overall “problematizes notions of identity so routinely governed by markers of sex and gender” and that we must engage with uncomfortable, hateful perspectives to understand their power. By analogy, Porousness (XXIV) asks us to engage with an uncomfortable psychological scenario: a seemingly innocent teasing that actually carries undertones of hate, or at least aggression. The twin’s motive is never clarified – is it malicious bullying or just mindless play? The text pointedly withholds the brother’s intent (“any insight on the brother’s motives is left out of the fiction” ), which makes the trauma feel arbitrary and implacable. The other is “merely a face”, a looming presence whose meaning the boy interprets as pure malice. This narrative silence, as López-Sande notes, mirrors the one-sided “Brief Interviews” in the book, where we hear only the male interviewees and not the interviewer’s voice. In both cases, Wallace intentionally omits one side of the dialogue, forcing us to experience the oppressive asymmetry that the protagonist feels.
Readers and critics have found the portrayal of the boy’s psychological torment both disturbing and insightful. Some, like the blogger on Philo on Books, confessed they weren’t sure “how psychologically insightful it is” – wondering if Wallace’s depiction of such extreme inner distress in a child is realistic or “fanciful armchair psychology.” Many others, however, have argued that Wallace is incisively capturing the birth of shame and self-contempt. The BookRags analysis, for example, flatly describes “(XXIV)” as “effectively a meditation on self-consciousness” and notes that the boy is distressed not because of physical pain but because his own emotional expressions are thrown back at him in distorted form. That is a remarkably precise diagnosis of a childhood trauma that can haunt adult life – the idea that seeing oneself ridiculed can initiate a lifelong guardedness. Literary scholar Toon Staes (writing about Wallace’s approach to sincerity) might classify this as one of Wallace’s demonstrations of “how awareness, love, and ethics” can be undermined by the performance of another. Even though the content of Porousness (XXIV) involves no overt sexual or gendered violence (unlike some other Brief Interviews stories), it has been positioned adjacent to Wallace’s broader critique of how people harm each other in intimate settings. In Brief Interviews, the hideous men wield charm, language, or manipulation to violate trust. In “Porousness (XXIV),” a hideous twin (so to speak) wields a wordless facial parody to violate his brother’s sense of self. It’s a quieter but no less potent species of cruelty.
Structure, Form, and Metafictional Elements
Critics often remark on the unconventional structure and style of Wallace’s short fiction, and “Porousness (XXIV)” is no exception. Although brief (only a few pages), the story is stylistically dense – “very abstract and symbolic, … much more poem than prose,” as one blogger observed. Wallace casts the piece as a reminiscence or confession from the now-grown protagonist: it’s narrated in first person, past tense, looking back on this formative childhood incident. Notably, the story is written as one single paragraph (in the Brief Interviews book, it spans a couple of pages with no paragraph break). This unbroken block of text can feel claustrophobic, mirroring the trap of the boy’s looping thoughts. The narration builds momentum in typical Wallace fashion, with lengthy sentences piling on detail and anxiety. By not giving the reader a paragraph break or a dialogue break, Wallace formally immerses us in the boy’s subjective delirium – we, too, feel the increasing pressure with no relief until the final punctuating sentence.
The placement of the story as the finale of Brief Interviews also carries structural significance. As the concluding piece, “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XXIV)” functions almost like a coda or final movement of a composition, one that circles back to key motifs from earlier in the book. In fact, commentators have noted that the “Porousness” vignettes (VI, XI, XXIV) and other recurring titled pieces (like the multiple “Brief Interviews” sections and the two “The Devil is a Busy Man” pieces) act as threads weaving the collection together. Blogger Edwin Turner (Biblioklept) pointed out that these running vignettes “unify the book’s structure, making its sum more than just a collection of previously-published stories.” The Porousness series in particular appears at three strategic points in the book – early (VI), mid-book (XI), and the very end (XXIV) – almost like refrain stanzas. Each one is short, suggestive, and centered on a moment of interpersonal rupture. For example, Porousness (VI) (which Wallace subtitled the “author’s parents’ marriage’s end, 1971”) is a one-page dialogue of a husband and wife bitterly sniping “‘Don’t love you no more.’ / ‘Right back at you.’” and so on, even callously bargaining “what about the boy” as if he were property. That vignette showcases a collapsed boundary between love and hate in a marriage – a “porous border” between devotion and cruelty. Porousness (XI), likewise brief, depicts a person haunted all day by a nightmare of being blind. In each of these, a line is crossed: spouses treating each other (and their child) as objects, or a dream crossing into waking life and altering one’s perspective. By the time we reach “Porousness (XXIV)” at the book’s close, we have a thematic through-line: Wallace has repeatedly shown how intimate relationships and encounters with others pierce the armor of the self. The final story crystallizes this in perhaps the starkest way – through children and twins, the most literal same/other pairing possible. It’s as if Wallace is saying, “After all these hideous men and failed connections, here is the primal scene of how people become alienated from themselves.” The placement gives the story a heavy resonance; as one study guide asks, “What is the impact of Wallace making this the final story in the collection?”. The implied answer is that it leaves the reader with an image of irreversible loss of innocence, forcing us to reevaluate everything before it as part of a cycle of damaged identity and communication.
On a more overtly metafictional level, the story (like many in Brief Interviews) refuses to provide a neat, closed narrative. Wallace often toys with fragmentation, non-linearity, and self-referential devices, and while Porousness (XXIV) is narratively straightforward, its context in the series is anything but. The decision to label it “(XXIV)” – suggesting it’s the 24th example, when in reality the book only contains three – is a little metafictional joke that has prompted much speculation. As López-Sande notes, “the inconsistent numeration at the end of each associated title” seems to celebrate “fragmentariness and incompleteness,” inviting us to imagine all the untold missing “Porousness” tales. This nod to incompleteness resonates with Wallace’s broader artistic project. Scholar Matteo Morsia (whom López-Sande cites) argues that Brief Interviews deliberately embraces the “unfinished.” The book resists offering full closure or a fully unified plot, instead presenting itself as a collage or “short story cycle” (akin to a concept album). Porousness (XXIV), by pretending to be the last installment of a long series we haven’t seen, both frustrates and teases the reader. It implicitly asks: What are the other borders? What other examples have we missed? This prompts “conflicting interpretations” – is the idea that every preceding story in the collection could be read as another “example of porous borders”? (Indeed, many of them do involve boundary-crossings of various sorts.) Wallace thus uses a metaleptic trick: he creates a title that steps outside the bounds of the text, hinting at an unrealized larger structure. It’s the kind of self-referential play that one Guardian reviewer (Nicholas Lezard) cynically described as Wallace having “his metafictional cake and eating it” – but it’s also key to the book’s effect. By violating the “fourth wall” of the short story collection’s completeness, Wallace draws attention to the artifice of storytelling. The reader becomes aware that Wallace is ordering these pieces for a reason, not just compiling them. This reflexivity encourages us to look for the deeper unifying concerns (which, as we’ve discussed, revolve around identity, performance, and empathy).
Another metafictional element in “Porousness (XXIV)”, subtle but notable, is its relationship to the author figure. Recall that in Porousness (VI), the subtitle explicitly mentions “Author’s parents”. Wallace is half-hinting that the vignette about a marital breakup might spring from his own life (Wallace’s parents did divorce in the 1970s). Whether or not that’s true, using the word “Author” invites us to conflate the narrator’s world with Wallace’s reality – a classic metafictional blurring. In Porousness (XXIV), Wallace doesn’t use such a direct device, but some critics have nonetheless read it autobiographically (as noted, linking the boy’s panic to Wallace’s). The story’s emotional authenticity and interiority perhaps owe something to Wallace’s personal battles with anxiety and self-image. In this sense, one could argue the story contains a metafictional mirror of Wallace himself: the hyper-aware, self-disgusted consciousness that, as critic Adam Kirsch once noted, “knows itself too well, and is disgusted by what it knows.” Wallace’s prose style – full of tics, self-qualifications, and digressions – has often been described as the expression of an overactive, self-lacerating mind. In Porousness (XXIV), that style is put in service of a character who experiences exactly that kind of mind. The form and content reinforce each other: long, looping sentences convey the “maddening self-consciousness” of the protagonist , even as the story’s structural games (like the title numbering) remind us this is also a kind of case study Wallace is presenting. It’s as if Wallace invites us to diagnose the case – to recognize the pattern of a mind “moving in paranoid, self-fulfilling circularity” (to quote Lezard’s review) and thus to see how such pathology might underlie many of the other tales of loneliness and disconnection in the book. In sum, the story’s form – from its internal monologue style to its placement and title – works on a metafictional level to highlight the themes of reflection and porous boundaries between author/character, reader/character, and story/collection.
Critical Reception and Broader Interpretations in Wallace’s Oeuvre
When Brief Interviews with Hideous Men was first published, some reviewers were puzzled or ambivalent about these experimental pieces. For example, Nicholas Lezard’s 2000 Guardian review wryly described Wallace’s project as that of a “conscientious and talented writer” struggling against “the perceived impossibility of fictional honesty” in an age of extreme self-consciousness. Lezard noted how Wallace’s stories often “reflect and tacitly comment on the fractured state of the restless Western mind” with their “paranoid, self-fulfilling circularity”. This observation, intended somewhat tongue-in-cheek, actually pinpoints why critics now find “Porousness (XXIV)” so significant. The story encapsulates Wallace’s core concerns at the turn of the millennium: the difficulty of genuine communication in a culture of masks and performances, the struggle to be sincere when one is painfully aware of oneself, and the ever-present hope (or question) of empathy.
In the years since, literary scholars have increasingly placed Brief Interviews – and “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XXIV)” in particular – in the context of Wallace’s broader themes and evolution. Marshall Boswell, in his Understanding David Foster Wallace (2003), interprets Brief Interviews as a deliberate departure from the sprawling maximalism of Infinite Jest toward a more distilled examination of “the egotism and isolation of contemporary Americans.” Boswell notes that the stories often feature fractured forms (e.g. Q-and-A transcripts, stories with missing conclusions, etc.) as a way to “salvage the aesthetic disaster” of postmodern self-referentiality by confronting it head-on. In other words, Wallace uses the very tools of metafiction to lay bare emotional truths. Porousness (XXIV) fits this approach: it fragments the notional series (giving us part XXIV with no context) and thereby focuses us intensely on one raw moment. The emotional truth that emerges – a child’s devastating encounter with his own reflected image – is precisely the kind of “acute self-consciousness” Boswell identifies as Wallace’s torment and subject. Boswell and others have also commented on Wallace’s interest in performativity: characters performing roles to hide their vulnerability. In Brief Interviews, the male speakers perform macho or manipulative personas even as their monologues betray loneliness or misogyny. By contrast, Porousness (XXIV) strips away dialogue and shows a pre-verbal kind of performativity (facial expressions), thereby getting perhaps even closer to the bone. We witness the birth of performative self-censorship in that kitchen scene – a moment that anticipates the emotionally stunted adults elsewhere in the book.
Themes of identity and the “True Self” versus performed self echo throughout Wallace’s canon, and critics position “Porousness (XXIV)” in that continuum. The story’s exploration of a fractured self-image under an other’s gaze recalls the climactic revelation in Wallace’s later story “Good Old Neon” (2001), where the narrator, a fraud-obsessed man, describes seeing his own face in photographs and feeling it looks like “someone else’s face” – a realization that precipitates his suicide. Both instances use the motif of seeing one’s face from the outside and despising it, a clear through-line in Wallace’s work. Critic Steven Moore has noted that Wallace’s characters often crave authenticity but are terrified of being truly seen; they oscillate between solipsism and yearning for connection. Porousness (XXIV) captures that oscillation in miniature: the boy desperately wants his mother to notice and stop the mimicry, yet he also wants to hide (he tries to get his mother to look at the brother instead, “attempt[ing] by expression alone to make Mum look up from me and see him” ). This futile attempt at triangulation – using the mother’s gaze to counter the brother’s gaze – fails, leaving the boy feeling utterly isolated. Scholars like David Hering and Clare Hayes-Brady have argued that Wallace’s stories frequently invoke a “gap between subjectivities” that the reader is invited to help bridge. In Brief Interviews, the gaps are literal (the unheard questions, the blank last pages of some interviews); in Porousness (XXIV), the gap is the unknowability of the brother’s intent and the mother’s apparent obliviousness. The engaged reader, sensitive to Wallace’s project, might recognize this and supply empathy where the characters do not.
Empathy – or its absence – is indeed a key part of the critical discourse around this story. Some interpreters view “Porousness (XXIV)” as Wallace issuing a challenge of empathy to the reader. We naturally sympathize with the suffering boy, but can we also empathize with the mimicking brother (who may himself be a child seeking attention or play)? Wallace withholds any easy answer. However, by framing the tale as the narrator’s recovered memory or confession, Wallace creates an opening for compassion: the adult narrator is processing this childhood trauma, inviting the reader to share in the understanding of how it shaped him. This aligns with what Wallace, in essays and interviews, often emphasized – that fiction should “make us feel less alone” and should “bridge the gap between self and other.” Some critics, like Ferma Lekesizalin, have examined Brief Interviews through psychoanalytic lenses (Lacanian and Freudian), concluding that Wallace “undermines hegemonic notions of masculinity” and reveals the “symptoms of male neurosis” in the text. While Porousness (XXIV) is about children, not adult men, it arguably shows the origin of such neuroses: a boy made to feel ridiculous for emoting may well grow into a man unable to express vulnerability except through “symptoms” (like the comedic or cruel performances seen in other characters). In that sense, the story has been positioned as a kind of Rosetta stone for Wallace’s exploration of “intersubjectivity” – the porous and often painful exchange between self and other that is necessary for empathy but fraught with the risk of misrecognition. By dramatizing a failure of empathy (neither the twin nor the mother empathizes with the boy’s anguish in the moment), Wallace highlights the stakes of human connection that all his work grapples with.
Finally, an underexplored but intriguing angle some commentators have raised is the philosophical commentary embedded in the Oblivion version, “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.” The title’s nod to Richard Rorty is not just superficial. Rorty’s book famously argues against the idea of the mind as a mirror of reality, and instead promotes a view of knowledge as a matter of conversation and social practice. In Wallace’s story, the mirror is the mother’s face (and the bus window reflections), and the reality that gets distorted is the mother’s and son’s understanding of themselves. One Reddit-based critic noted that the mother-and-son bus rides in Wallace’s story consciously mirror the events of O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” which itself is about generational and racial inability to truly see one another. O’Connor’s story and Wallace’s both end in a kind of convergence gone wrong – a failed epiphany. By referencing Rorty (whose pragmatism emphasizes solidarity and sympathy over objective truth) and Teilhard/O’Connor (who emphasize an ultimate unity of humanity), Wallace may be situating “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” as a meditation on empathy’s limits and possibilities. The Oblivion story adds layers like the mother’s endless litigation (suggesting an obsessive quest to “fix” surfaces) and the son’s fascination with poisonous spiders (hints of danger lurking in domestic life). These details invite interpretations about American culture’s fixation on appearances, legal retribution, and the “monsters” we harbor – themes that go beyond the personal and into social critique. While less has been published on this story compared to Wallace’s more famous works, the discourse that does exist (in scholarly footnotes and passionate online discussions) shows that the “Porous Borders” concept is rich with meaning: it touches on parent–child relationships, the way trauma can be passed down or “condition the development” of children , and how our faces (or public selves) can both conceal and catastrophically reveal our inner life.
In conclusion, “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XXIV)” has been critically appreciated as a microcosm of Wallace’s central preoccupations: the longing for authentic selfhood and connection, and the tragic-comic ways these are thwarted by our own reflexive awareness. Its reception ranges from puzzled (early reviewers unsure what to make of its fragmentary nature) to deeply insightful (scholars using it to discuss Levinasian ethics, Ricoeur’s narrative identity, and Lacanian mirror-stages). Common readings emphasize the story’s portrayal of self-consciousness as both revelation and damage – an idea supported by numerous critics and analyses. Underexplored angles – such as the intertextual dialogue with O’Connor or the biographical resonance with Wallace’s life – add further depth, suggesting new interpretations that future scholars could develop. For example, one might read the story as Wallace’s sly critique of the “perform-or-die” ethos of contemporary society, starting in childhood, or as a comment on how artists themselves suffer under the gaze of critics (the boy’s twin could metaphorically be the critical audience mimicking and judging the artist’s expression – a stretch, but an intriguing one). What is clear from the critical discourse is that Porousness (XXIV), though brief, stands as a key node in Wallace’s thematic web – illuminating how the porous border between self and other is both the site of our deepest vulnerabilities and, potentially, the doorway to our salvation (through understanding and empathy). Wallace leaves us with a profoundly ambivalent image: a child’s face gone blank in self-defense, a “gagged mask” of a self that can no longer be hurt. It’s a cautionary finale that makes us ponder all the ways we perform, protect, and perceive ourselves – and it challenges us, as readers, to find the human truth behind the masks.
Sources
• Marshall Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace (2003).
• Sergio López-Sande, “Of Boundaries Weaponized: David Foster Wallace’s ‘Porous Borders’ and the Infinite Loops of Self-Consciousness,” Journal of the Short Story in English 75 (2020).
• Brief Interviews with Hideous Men – Philo on Books (blog review, 2016).
• Bookrags Study Guide – Brief Interviews… (summary of “Porousness (XXIV)”).
• Nicholas Lezard, “Digging for story bones” – The Guardian (Feb 19, 2000).
• Edwin Turner, “Essential Short Story Collections: Brief Interviews…” – Biblioklept (Feb 10, 2008).
• Reddit DFW group – “Oblivion Group Read Week 6 – Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” (discussion by user PatMoN, 2022).
• Sergio López-Sande, JSSE article (further excerpts) .
• Philo on Books (blog) – closing thoughts on Brief Interviews.
• Journal of Literary Studies 39:1 (2023) – Ferma Lekesizalin, “Enjoying the Symptom: Wallace’s Brief Interviews…”.
• Postgraduate English 32 (2016) – Matt Alexander, “Engaging with DFW’s Hideous Men”.
• Journal of the Short Story in English 75 – López-Sande (context of series and identity).
• Journal of the Short Story in English 75 – López-Sande (narrative voice and absence).
• Journal of the Short Story in English 75 – López-Sande (looping self-consciousness and D.T. Max bio).
• Journal of the Short Story in English 75 – López-Sande (ending as speech act, Ricoeur on identity).
• Journal of the Short Story in English 75 – López-Sande (violence as misrecognition).
• Journal of the Short Story in English 75 – López-Sande (face as attacker, Levinas reference).
• Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (Little, Brown, 1999) – Text of “Yet Another Example… (XXIV)” (for reference to story content).