The Depressed Person
Introduction
David Foster Wallace’s “The Depressed Person” (first published in Harper’s in 1998 and collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, 1999) has invited intense critical scrutiny and divided opinion. Ostensibly a bleakly comic portrait of a chronically depressed woman’s inner life, the story is notorious for its claustrophobic, recursive narration and unflinching focus on emotional pain. From the outset, Wallace immerses readers in the protagonist’s “terrible and unceasing emotional pain” and the “impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain”. Critics largely agree that Wallace captures the solipsism and self-consuming anguish of severe depression with brutal authenticity – but they diverge sharply on whether the story elicits empathy for its suffering narrator or mocks her as selfish and “unlikeable.” Indeed, the story’s tone, use of irony, gender dynamics, and attitude toward “therapy culture” have spurred debates across academic scholarship, book reviews, and even online forums. What follows is a comprehensive mapping of the critical discourse: from academic analyses of its themes and structure to reviews and essays grappling with its emotional tenor. We will see where interpretations converge – for instance, on the story’s harrowing depiction of a mind trapped in depression’s feedback loop – and where they conflict, such as over whether Wallace’s treatment of the “depressed person” is ultimately empathetic or merciless. In the end, this survey will highlight both well-trodden angles and those still underexplored, laying groundwork for new critical readings of this provocative short story.
Portrayal of Depression: Authenticity and Extreme Solipsism
Nearly all commentators acknowledge that “The Depressed Person” offers an extreme and uncompromising portrayal of mental illness – one that many find viscerally recognizable, while others deem it distorted or unfair. On one hand, some readers with lived experience of depression have praised the story as uncannily “accurate”. For example, Kathleen Elise of Litro magazine, writing from personal familiarity with mood disorders, lauded Wallace for “get[ting] it right” in depicting the shame, isolation, and futile treatments of clinical depression. She argues that “The Depressed Person” resonates with sufferers by validating the inexpressible “hell” of persistent depression – from the numbing parade of failed medications to the “all too recognisable” inadequacy one feels when trying and failing to articulate psychic pain to others. Similarly, journalist Jesse Singal recalls being “roughed up” by the story’s ruthless interiority, calling it “maybe the best thing [he] ha[s] ever read about mental health” for how unflinchingly it transports the reader “inside the illness”. Wallace drills down into the protagonist’s world of constant torment, chronicling how her depression consumes every interaction – “nothing that happens to her can have any meaning except in the context of her illness”. The narrative even shows the depressed person’s alarming reaction to her therapist’s sudden death: she finds that all her resulting grief is “all and only for herself, i.e., for her loss, her abandonment”. Such details illustrate a painful truth: the character has become, by her own admission, a near-solipsistic “black hole” incapable of empathy. For many critics, this brutally honest portrait of depression’s “bottomless” inward spiral is one of Wallace’s most powerful achievements – if also one of his most disturbing. As Singal puts it, the story “took [him] so brutally, unflinchingly inside the illness… that [he] felt knocked out afterward,” and indeed many readers (himself included) “never want to read [it] ever again” despite its brilliance.
On the other hand, a number of critics have questioned whether Wallace’s depiction is too extreme or even skewed by satire, thereby risking a lack of empathy. The protagonist is not just depressed but also portrayed as deeply self-absorbed – a feature that drew “a fair amount of criticism upon publication”. Early reviewers complained that this unnamed “depressed person” is almost comically “shallow and unlikeable” , endlessly focused on her own misery despite the genuine hardships of those around her. (Famously, the story reveals that one long-suffering friend in her “Support System” is dying of cancer – yet the depressed person still calls to unload her trivial anxieties, oblivious to her friend’s condition.) This aspect has led some to read the piece as a satire or caricature of a certain “type” of depressive. In fact, Wallace may have had a real-life target in mind: journalist Lindsay Beyerstein notes speculation that “The Depressed Person” was inspired by 1990s memoirist Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation, to the point of dubbing Wurtzel “The Professionally Depressed Person.” If true, this would cast the story as a thinly veiled send-up of Wurtzel’s confessional depression narratives – an origin that has prompted some to label the story “misogynistic” in its skewering of a female figure. (One recent scholar flatly calls it a “dark, misogynistic story” that “undoubtedly reflects a misogynist masculine perspective on a person” like Wurtzel.) Even without accepting that backstory, several readers have been struck by what they perceive as the absence of authorial empathy. On a Reddit forum, one reader marveled at the “absolutely no empathy for the central character”, calling that “utterly astonishing given [Wallace’s] own struggles with depression.” Indeed, Wallace himself suffered lifelong clinical depression – yet here he seems to present a depressed protagonist who inspires more irritation than compassion. This dissonance has fueled debate: Is Wallace intentionally mocking the self-involvement that depression can breed, or is he attempting a good-faith rendering of how unbearably consuming the illness feels? Critics are split. Some, like Beyerstein, suggest Wallace’s focus is on how exasperating a depressed person “who [is] not a particularly likeable person” can be to others – implying a satirical edge to the story. Others, however, argue that the depiction is rooted in authentic pain, not mean-spiritedness. For instance, blogger Kathleen Elise admits the character is exaggeratedly “grating,” but insists “her feelings and experiences are not [exaggerated].” Wallace, she argues, captures real depressive agony under the character’s annoying surface, making “The Depressed Person” “possibly, the most accurate account of depression I have read.” In short, most critics concede that Wallace has drawn a frighteningly extreme case of depression – one that pushes the trope of the “depressed narcissist” to an uncomfortable extreme. What they disagree on is whether this extremity serves an empathetic purpose (conveying the “indescribable hell” of severe illness) or a satirical one (critiquing a self-centered “victim” mentality). This tension – empathetic insight vs. biting satire – lies at the heart of nearly every discussion of “The Depressed Person.”
Narrative Structure and Recursion: Form Mirroring Illness
Wallace’s stylistic choices in “The Depressed Person” have attracted extensive commentary, especially regarding how the structure and language reinforce the story’s themes. The narrative is famously dense with digressions, qualifiers, and footnotes, creating a recursive, almost suffocating textual experience. Critics often note that reading the story feels like being trapped in the protagonist’s looping thought patterns – an intentional effect that several scholars praise as formally ingenious. As Zadie Smith observed, “even on the level of the sentence” Wallace manages to mimic “the cyclical, negative-feedback loops” of the depressed person’s mind. The prose is laden with self-referential asides and relentless self-analysis, such that each sentence seems to fold back on itself in endless qualification – much as the narrator’s every attempt to articulate her pain collapses into second-guessing and guilt. Wallace even includes multiple footnotes (some over a page long) that interrupt the main text with additional layers of neurotic detail. One academic analysis notes that this “formal organization” – footnotes that spin out to such length they nearly subsume the primary narrative – effectively “creates a time within the time of the narrative, firmly attached to the past and sorrows, in such a way that the main text becomes muffled by the white noise of inescapable thoughts.” In other words, the story’s very form enacts the entrapment of depression: the footnotes bury the forward motion of the plot (what little there is) under an avalanche of obsessive ruminations, leaving reader and character alike mired in cognitive static.
Many scholars view this formal recursion as a brilliant simulation of the depressive experience. A recent article in a psychiatry journal contrasts “The Depressed Person” with one of Wallace’s earlier depression-themed stories, noting that while the earlier story tells us what depression feels like, “The Depressed Person” actually makes the reader feel it by “creating experiences [for the reader] potentially similar to those felt by depressed people.” The unpleasant tedium of the narrative – its repetition, digression, and hyper-analysis – is thus deliberate: Wallace is performing a kind of narrative empathy exercise, forcing us to inhabit a mind that cannot stop chewing on its own pain. This aligns with Wallace’s broader aesthetic project of using fiction to bridge inner experiences. As one medical humanities scholar argues, the story “holds an important, if under-recognized place” among 1990s depression narratives for exactly this reason: it challenges the assumption that simply narrating one’s pain is healing, by showing that such narration can itself become “articulated, sustained, and regenerated” pain. The form reveals how attempts to tell one’s trauma can loop back into retraumatizing oneself – a meta-commentary on the limits of language in therapy.
Not everyone, however, admires the execution. Detractors contend that the structural gimmicks (the footnotes, etc.) veer into overindulgence. In some reviews, the story is described as more of a writing “exercise” than a successful piece of fiction. Even sympathetic readers concede that Wallace’s dense style here is intentionally hard to swallow – one critic quips that certain passages are so “over the top disgusting” or verbose that they “can only be parody”. But whether one finds the style masterful or exhausting, most agree it is closely tied to the story’s effect. The lack of clear plot resolution, too, is noted as significant: the story famously ends with the depressed person still hunched in despair, “trembling in a near-fetal position”, begging a friend for an honest verdict on what kind of awful person she is. There is no catharsis or insight – only the “open question” (as one scholar puts it) of “what all she had learned said about her,” now implicitly posed to the reader who has witnessed her monologue. Some critics, like E. M. Morsia, have argued that by ending on this unanswered question, Wallace cleverly transforms the story into an interactive moral query – essentially casting the reader as another member of the depressed person’s “Support System,” forced to “formulate some kind of report on the meaning” of her tale. In this view, the open-ended structure implicates us in judging or empathizing with her, thereby extending the story’s commentary on communication and understanding. In sum, the formal and structural criticism of “The Depressed Person” converges on the idea that form mirrors content: whether seen as a virtuosic immersion into a depressed mind or as tedious “onanism,” the story’s recursive structure undeniably serves to illustrate the very lonely, self-referential cage that the depressed protagonist inhabits.
Tone and Sincerity vs. Irony
One of the thorniest debates surrounding “The Depressed Person” is the question of tone: is the story meant to be read with sincere pathos or with a layer of ironic distance (even dark humor)? Wallace is often associated with a literary move “beyond irony” toward sincerity, yet this story complicates that narrative. Many detect a strong streak of black comedy in its portrayal of misery. The unnamed protagonist’s hyper-self-aware yet un-self-aware condition (she constantly apologizes for burdening her friends, even as she continues to burden them) strikes some as so exaggerated that it borders on cruel satire. The entertainingmrpetre review, for example, calls “The Depressed Person” a “dazzling and blackly humorous portrayal” of a woman’s mental state. The reviewer admits it’s “incredible” how Wallace sustains the voice, but notes “you end up hating this person” – particularly her failure to see the “narcissism” of calling a terminally ill friend to complain about her own problems. This reaction – laughing in discomfort or exasperation at the protagonist’s oblivious self-centeredness – is not uncommon. In In These Times, Beyerstein frankly describes Wurtzel (thought to be an inspiration for the character) as “exasperating as only a depressed person can be”, “not a particularly likeable person at the best of times”. Such remarks highlight how the story’s tone can be read as bitingly satirical: it lampoons the kind of person who wallows in victimhood and monologues about their trauma to anyone who will listen. Even Wallace’s stylistic choices – like capitalizing terms such as “Support System” and “Inner Child” – carry a whiff of irony, as if gently mocking the jargon of therapy culture.
Yet, in tension with this, there runs an undercurrent of genuine anguish in the text that other critics emphasize. The question often raised is: to what end does Wallace depict the depressed person’s obnoxious traits? Is it merely to score satirical points, or to evoke pity (or something more complex)? Some scholars argue that the story’s deeper aim is empathetic, albeit in a challenging way. For instance, Allard den Dulk observes that most early critics interpreted “The Depressed Person” as implying an inevitable failure of communication – a very cynical, arguably ironic theme (the idea that sharing one’s pain is futile). However, den Dulk’s recent comparative study pushes back, suggesting that Wallace actually wants the story to achieve a form of communication and empathy that the protagonist herself cannot. By comparing the story to Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (another first-person narrative of pathological self-consciousness), den Dulk argues that while both depressed narrators “fail to realize communication and empathy,” the works themselves succeed in engaging the reader’s empathy and self-reflection. In this reading, Wallace’s tone may seem merciless on the surface, but it conceals a moral earnestness: he portrays the worst of depressive narcissism in order to spur the reader’s own empathetic or ethical response (for example, to recognize the humanity still present in this “awful” person and in oneself). This aligns with Wallace’s well-documented interest in sincerity and “real” feeling beyond postmodern snark. Indeed, Wallace reportedly found writing “The Depressed Person” an intensely personal ordeal – he confessed it “was the most painful thing [he] ha[d] ever done,” because it revealed a part of himself (a “deep self-obsession”) that he rarely wrote about. Such a statement suggests that the story was, at least in conception, rooted in self-sincerity: Wallace exploring his own depressive narcissism with lacerating honesty. Some critics therefore see the story not as a cruel joke at a depressed person’s expense, but as a form of self-critique or desperate self-expression, thinly veiled in fiction. As one Reddit commenter perceptively noted, “DFW seemed to have a prejudice that depression was selfish/narcissistic, but that bias was just his symptom of depression itself. … His short story was just a thinly disguised exercise in self-loathing.” In this view, the tone might read as “dishonest” or mocking on the surface, but underneath it is tragically sincere – the author’s own “insistent, unending wail” channeled through a fictional avatar.
Ultimately, critical consensus lands somewhere in the middle: “The Depressed Person” is both satirical and sorrowful, often at the same time. It walks a tightrope between farce and tragedy. The dark humor (e.g. the absurdity of someone so self-involved that even her self-loathing becomes an ego-centric performance) serves a purpose – to illuminate the grotesque inward spiral of depression – but it does not necessarily negate the story’s compassion. Readers’ responses seem to depend on personal sensibilities. Some find the tonal mix jarring or “infuriating,” accusing Wallace of mean-spiritedness or lack of “honesty” in depicting depression. Others discern a kind of tough-love honesty in how unflattering the portrayal is, arguing that Wallace was willing to show the ugly side of depression (the part that makes sufferers inadvertently hurt or alienate others) precisely to broaden our empathy for the mentally ill. As one medical humanities article put it, the story forces us to consider the “interactive phenomenon” of chronic depression – how it is “sustained and regenerated through problematic contexts of interaction”. In plainer terms: depression doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it affects and is affected by relationships. Wallace’s tone, by being unsparing, draws attention to those relational dynamics (the frustrated friends, the weary therapist, etc.). Thus, whether one laughs or winces while reading, the uncomfortable tone itself is part of Wallace’s interrogation of emotional sincerity: the story asks how we can feel genuine pity for someone whose behavior is “awful,” and whether her performance of suffering is any less “real” for being self-focused. These questions remain open, which is exactly why the story continues to fascinate and divide its audience.
Gender Dynamics and Feminist Critiques
Given that “The Depressed Person” centers on a female protagonist written by a male author, it has inevitably attracted commentary through a gendered lens – especially in the context of Wallace’s broader treatment of women. The story appears in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, a collection largely concerned with grotesque or predatory male characters. Ironically, “The Depressed Person” is one of the few pieces in the book where the “hideous” figure is female – or at least, where a woman’s flaws are dissected under the narrative microscope. Some feminist readers have thus viewed the story with suspicion, worrying that Wallace’s portrayal plays into sexist stereotypes (e.g. the narcissistic, hysterical woman). The possible model of Elizabeth Wurtzel intensifies these concerns: if Wallace indeed “used her as the inspiration”, as one scholar phrases it, for this “dark, misogynistic” caricature , it could be seen as a male author taking a misogynistic swipe at a real woman’s genuine suffering. The Bran Nicol study (“The Ghosts of Elizabeth Wurtzel and DFW”) notes that Wurtzel herself, in a memorial essay about Wallace, wrote only circumspectly about him – while Wallace’s story (written years earlier) arguably haunts that exchange as an unfairly harsh judgment of Wurtzel’s depression and memoirism. Nicol ultimately argues that the story “undoubtedly reflects a misogynist masculine perspective” on its subject , even if Wallace’s intentions were more complex.
However, other critics have interpreted the gender dynamics in less accusatory ways, sometimes even flipping the script to find a feminist kernel in Wallace’s approach. For instance, some point out that Wallace was well-versed in feminist literature and theory, and they argue that he intended to critique misogyny, not perpetuate it. One essay in David Foster Wallace in Context observes that Wallace invokes feminist texts (as intertexts) precisely to “depict and challenge misogyny” in stories like “The Depressed Person.” Indeed, rather than presenting the depressed woman as an essentialized “female hysteric,” Wallace might be showing how she has internalized a culture of therapy speak and self-blame that is itself shaped by societal expectations of women (to be always self-sacrificing, etc.). Her extreme guilt over burdening others, for example, could be read as a satire of the pressures on women to be caregivers even when they are the ones in crisis. Moreover, the only voices we get besides the protagonist’s thoughts are those of (mostly male) authority figures – the psychiatrist, the absent father, etc. – filtered through her memory. It’s conceivable to read the story as implicitly critical of how those figures failed her, contributing to her warped self-view (though the text keeps this subtle).
That said, most discussion has not centered on feminist exoneration so much as on whether Wallace’s portrayal is fair. Even sympathetic critics acknowledge a certain gendered cruelty in how the character is drawn. She is, after all, the archetype of what media critic Susan Faludi once called the “Victim Feminist” trope – wallowing and paralyzed. The story’s vicious highlighting of her “narcissism and self-loathing” can certainly come across as gendered scorn. Some female readers have responded in a personal mode: writer Ashira Shirali, for example, penned a 2020 essay recounting how at 16 she saw “so much of [herself]” in Wallace’s depressed protagonist. Far from feeling insulted, Shirali felt “understood” by the story’s depiction of pathological guilt – yet years later, knowing of Wallace’s abusive behaviors toward women in his life, she revisited that admiration with conflict. Her essay wrestles with the classic art vs. artist problem: can one appreciate Wallace’s keen insight into a young woman’s psyche while also acknowledging his personal misogyny? Shirali ultimately decided to “break up” with Wallace’s work, turning to Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar for an arguably more authentically female depiction of depression. This anecdote underscores that reception of “The Depressed Person” cannot be divorced from gender dynamics – both within the text and around it. The story’s harsh portrayal of a woman’s emotional life raises uncomfortable questions: Is Wallace punching down at a female character (and by extension, at real women who suffer similarly)? Or is he, as some suggest, actually scrutinizing his own flaws (narcissism, neediness) but projecting them onto a female figure? The truth may encompass both. Importantly, even critics who decry the story’s perspective as misogynistic do not deny the acuity of its observations. The consensus, if any, might be that Wallace tapped into genuine features of depressive behavior but possibly did so with a masculine condescension that warrants critique. This remains a somewhat underexplored angle in scholarship – aside from Nicol’s 2021 article and a few forum debates, there is room for a more thorough feminist-disability reading of “The Depressed Person.” Such a reading might situate the story in a lineage of “female malady” narratives, or examine how the character’s depression is treated by those around her (mostly professionals or friends who exhibit a kind of quiet exasperation that could mirror societal attitudes toward women’s pain). As it stands, the gender debate adds yet another layer to the story’s rich interpretive field, ensuring it stays contentious.
Therapy Culture and Ironic Self-Help
Another major theme in discourse about “The Depressed Person” is its commentary on therapy culture and the performance of emotional pain. Set in the late 90s milieu of support groups and pop-psychology buzzwords, the story pointedly satirizes certain self-help clichés. Wallace peppers the text with capitalized terms – “Support System,” “Higher Power,” “Inner Child,” etc. – mimicking the way therapeutic concepts can become almost brand-names or mantras. Critics like Ellen Defossez note how the story was “written at a time when public knowledge of and talk about depression was surging” (the Prozac Nation era), and they argue that Wallace is critiquing the period’s prevailing assumptions: namely, that narrating one’s trauma leads to healing, and that unlimited empathy from others is the cure. In fact, the story suggests the opposite. By showing the depressed person endlessly narrativizing her childhood traumas – in therapy, on the phone, at a specialized retreat – Wallace highlights what Defossez calls the “inducement toward narrative” can sometimes “disempower” rather than heal. We see this when the protagonist attends a rigorous therapeutic workshop: she literally re-enacts her childhood trauma (participants role-play her divorcing parents and other “toxic figures” so she can berate them) and experiences a “cathartic tantrum” of screaming and pillow-pounding. Yet this outburst provides no relief – if anything, it “exacerbates [her] childhood trauma instead of relieving it,” leaving her regressively “in a child-like state” with no new insight. The implied message is that merely venting old resentments can be a dead-end, even a form of indulgence that keeps one stuck. Wallace explicitly addressed this in an interview, describing “the paradox of the popular psychology movement” whereby “the more we are taught to list and resent the things of which we were deprived as children, the more we remain children”. The story embodies this paradox: its heroine, encouraged by therapy to obsess over her past wounds, finds herself more dependent and infantile than ever.
Many critics read this as Wallace’s indictment of a certain kind of therapy that lacks true accountability or forward motion. The tale’s tragically ironic punchline is that the depressed person’s therapist, the one who endlessly encouraged her to dig into childhood pain, has died by suicide herself – suggesting perhaps that the therapeutic framework failed both patient and provider. One scholar notes that the therapist in the story tries every “creative” technique (analogy, art therapy, etc.) and medication in the book, yet ultimately “fails to endure the immense torment of depression” herself. This bleak outcome underscores Wallace’s skeptical view of the 90s Prozac-and-talk-therapy zeitgeist. As critic María Lekesizalin observes, Wallace associates the story’s psychological terms and pill names with a kind of commercialization (they are presented almost as jargon or “branding”) – hinting that the industry of therapy might itself be part of the problem.
At the same time, Wallace stops short of outright dismissing therapy; instead, he zeroes in on how the depressed person “performs” her suffering within the therapeutic context. Several commentators remark on the performative, even manipulative, aspects of her behavior: she calls friends late at night to describe her despair in excruciating detail, extracting their sympathy; she is keenly aware (and guilty) that she is acting the role of “one of those dreaded types… who call at inconvenient times and just go on and on about themselves,” yet she cannot stop herself. This paradox – sincerely feeling pain but also almost using that pain to solicit attention – is at the heart of what some call the story’s exploration of “emotional performance.” The depressed person is constantly evaluating how her expressions of pain are received (she imagines her friends wincing when they hear her voice on the phone ), and she even explicitly asks a friend to “describe and assess… what terms might be used” for her endless emotional needs. It is as if she wants an objective audit of her own melodrama. Critics like Clare Hayes-Brady have seized on this aspect, arguing that the character “fails in her attempts at communication” because “her communication is utterly one-sided; the insistent, unending wail of a baby with unmet needs.” In Hayes-Brady’s view (from her book The Unspeakable Failures of DFW), the protagonist is stuck at a pre-lingual stage – she can only perform pain (by wailing, complaining, re-enacting childhood scenes), not truly communicate it in a dialogic, reciprocal way. This insight links back to the story’s critique of therapy culture: if the goal of therapy is to restore one’s capacity to articulate and process pain, Wallace shows a case where therapy instead nurtured a kind of reflexive self-pity that short-circuits genuine communication. As another analyst succinctly puts it, the depressed person “prolongs her own suffering by constantly returning to the figurative scene of the crime” – she cannot move on because she is addicted to narrating her victimhood.
In summation, critics tend to agree that “The Depressed Person” is a savvy commentary on late-20th-century self-help culture, exposing its limitations and ironies. Whether this commentary is delivered with gentle sympathy or scathing satire is, again, in the eye of the beholder. Some find it insightful that Wallace highlights the selfishness that can lurk in self-hatred (as Wallace reportedly said, “there’s a lot of narcissism in self-hatred” ). Others feel Wallace goes too far and mocks the very real need for support that depressed people have – possibly feeding into stigma (e.g. the notion that depressed individuals are just “selfish”). Yet even those uncomfortable with the portrayal acknowledge that Wallace pinpointed a real phenomenon: the story “reveals the contradictions of [the depressed] discourse”, showing how pleas for empathy can inadvertently become demands that drain others. In this light, “The Depressed Person” contributes to an important dialogue about the ethics of caregiving and the complex dynamics between a suffering individual and her support network. By mapping the bleak symbiosis between the protagonist and her “support system” (who listen out of duty or pity, not true friendship), Wallace prompts readers to consider the uncomfortable reality that empathy has limits – and that the culture of incessant self-expression may, paradoxically, leave one more isolated. This facet of the story has been fruitfully explored in medical humanities (Defossez’s work) and narrative medicine circles, but it remains ripe for further inquiry, especially as our contemporary therapy culture (with social media “performances” of mental health struggles) has only magnified since the 1990s. Wallace’s story anticipated many of these issues, making it, as one scholar argues, an “under-recognized” but crucial text in understanding the narrative of depression in modern literature.
Critical Convergences and Divergences
Across the wide spectrum of criticism on “The Depressed Person,” a few common threads emerge – as do several key points of divergence. Critics generally concur on the following: (1) Wallace’s technical craft in this story – the recursive sentences, footnotes, and interior monologue – is tightly bound to the subject matter of depression, creating a uniquely immersive (if painful) reading experience. (2) The story presents an intentionally extreme case of depression, foregrounding the illness’s most “impossible” aspects (e.g. inability to connect with others, endless self-reference). (3) The narrative is deeply intertextual with 90s therapy culture, critiquing or at least depicting the era’s psychological jargon and methods (support groups, childhood trauma excavation, etc.) with a sharp eye. And (4) the overall effect on readers is one of discomfort and provocation – the story is meant to inspire strong reactions, be it profound empathy, repulsion, or uneasy laughter (often all at once).
Where critics split is largely along lines we have traced: empathy vs. satire, sincerity vs. irony, and the ethical question of how Wallace handles gendered experience. Some maintain that Wallace wrote an almost vicious caricature (whether as a personal in-joke or a broader satire), and they fault the story for a lack of compassion – pointing to the apparent “dishonesty” of a depiction that wallows in the character’s flaws without alleviating or illuminating them. Others argue that underneath its grim humor, the story is an agonizingly honest statement of what extreme depression feels like from the inside, including the ugly parts, and that Wallace’s very boldness in showing a “narcissistically obsessed” depressed person expands our understanding of the illness. Notably, several scholars have recently tried to reconcile these views. Defossez, for instance, doesn’t sugarcoat that Wallace’s protagonist is one-sided and trapped, but she interprets the story as challenging the reader to see how that trap is constructed by interactional contexts, not simply by the individual’s moral failing. Likewise, den Dulk’s comparative work suggests that Wallace is performing a fictional experiment akin to Dostoevsky’s: he presents a repellently hyper-conscious narrator not to endorse her view, but to implicitly find a new mode of connection with the reader beyond the narrator’s failures. In other words, the story itself might be empathic even if the character is not. This kind of nuanced take is bridging earlier polarities in the criticism.
Neglected and Emerging Interpretive Angles
Despite the voluminous commentary, a few angles remain underexplored or have only recently begun to attract attention – suggesting fertile ground for new scholarship and “original critical readings.” One such area is comparative literary context. Den Dulk’s 2022 chapter was one of the first to put “The Depressed Person” in conversation with a classic text (Notes from Underground), highlighting thematic and formal parallels. Further comparisons could be drawn with other “narratives of suffering” – for example, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (another claustrophobic depiction of a woman’s mental breakdown) or Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. How does Wallace’s story converse with these predominantly female-voiced narratives of depression? Does it subvert or amplify their tropes? Such questions haven’t been fully probed. Similarly, the hauntological angle (as Bran Nicol’s title hints) – the “ghost” of Wurtzel and the ghost of Wallace’s own depression haunting each other – opens up inquiry into how this story “haunts” the discourse on depression and sincerity. Nicol’s article connects Wallace and Wurtzel under the theme of “Depression, Sincerity, Hauntology,” but there is room to delve deeper into how Wallace’s fictional approach might “ghost” the nonfictional memoir tradition and vice versa.
Another underdeveloped angle is a thorough feminist-disability studies reading. While critics have discussed misogyny and the depiction of mental illness stigma, a holistic feminist disability critique (examining the intersection of the character’s identity as a woman and as a person with a psychiatric disability in a cultural context) is largely absent. The LARB essay on Wurtzel hints that Wurtzel “changed how we think about memoir – and mental illness”, and that she was “the rare depressed person who scared the hell out of people” by speaking unsparingly about her condition. Wallace’s story, in turn, arguably scared some readers in a different way – by showing the depressed person not as a sympathetic victim but as a kind of emotional vampire. A feminist disability perspective might ask: does this reinforce harmful stereotypes about mentally ill women, or does it confront readers with the reality of how society fails such women (driving them to these extremes)? This debate remains open, as prior sections indicated, but it hasn’t been exhaustively parsed in academic literature.
Additionally, narrative technique could be examined in new lights. The field of genetic criticism has begun looking at Wallace’s drafts and compositional process (Morsia’s 2015 study of the story’s manuscripts ), revealing how Wallace revised the ending to be more open-ended and reflexive. Scholars might build on this to explore what was left out – for instance, early drafts apparently included even more explicit “dialogue” or different points of view that Wallace later removed. Investigating why those elements were cut could shed light on Wallace’s artistic intent (perhaps he did try giving the depressed person more of a voice or others’ perspectives, only to decide the solitary monologue was more effective).
Finally, an intriguingly neglected angle is the reader’s role as highlighted by Morsia and den Dulk. The story’s final gesture – effectively asking the reader to judge the “depressed person” – implicates us in an uncomfortable moral exercise. There is room for reader-response studies or ethical criticism to explore how different readers do respond: Do clinicians read it differently from patients? Do readers with depression react with self-recognition or offense? The anecdotal evidence (from forums, personal essays) is rich but has not been systematically studied. For example, as noted, some depressed readers felt seen by the story, while others felt misrepresented. Understanding the factors behind these divergent responses could contribute to narrative medicine – using the story perhaps as a case study in how literature evokes empathy (or fails to) for mental illness. One medical article already suggested that reading fiction like this can “broaden the capacity of clinicians and family members to re-create imaginatively someone else’s experience” of depression. Empirical research or interdisciplinary discussion could follow up: Has “The Depressed Person” been used in therapy or training, and with what effect? These questions illustrate that Wallace’s short story, far from being a dated provocation, continues to offer new pathways for inquiry.
In conclusion, the criticism of “The Depressed Person” covers a vast terrain – from detailed linguistic analysis of its recursive structure to impassioned debates about its ethical stance toward the depressed. Critics largely agree that the story is a tour de force in portraying the feel of depression (particularly its solipsism and despair), achieved through innovative narrative techniques. There is also consensus that Wallace is engaging (whether earnestly or satirically) with the therapy culture of his time, highlighting the pitfalls of a narcissistic or performative mode of healing. Yet opinion diverges on the story’s tone: is it empathetic or mocking toward its protagonist? Does it challenge or reinforce misogynistic views of “needy” women? These divergences often stem from each critic’s interpretive frame – biographical (knowing Wallace’s personal demons), ideological (feminist or antipsychiatry perspectives), or experiential (whether one identifies with the scenario). What stands out is that nearly every critic finds the story uncomfortable – and that very discomfort is frequently the subject of analysis, seen either as a flaw or as the point. In mapping this discourse, we see a “full spectrum”: at one pole, readers who laud the story’s unflinching honesty about depression’s ugliness and at the other, those who chastise it as cruel or “dishonest” in its lack of compassion. Many occupy the complex middle, appreciating Wallace’s craft and insight while questioning his stance.
For those seeking to develop new interpretations, this map of existing criticism provides both guidance and gaps. The agreed-upon foundations – e.g. that the story brilliantly mirrors depressive thought patterns, or that it interrogates the act of narrating pain – give any new reading a solid starting point. The open controversies – such as the empathy vs. irony debate – invite fresh evidence or theoretical angles to help resolve (or productively sustain) these tensions. And the underexplored areas identified – from deeper feminist analysis to reader-response studies – suggest how one might contribute original scholarship. In the end, “The Depressed Person” remains a rich, challenging text precisely because it elicits such a wide range of responses. As Wallace perhaps intended, it forces us to confront not only the nature of depression, but our own reactions to someone else’s suffering: do we empathize, judge, recoil, laugh uneasily – or all of the above? The critical conversation so far shows that critics themselves have done all of the above. This multiplicity of perspectives is less a failing of interpretation than a testament to the story’s unsettling power. By charting where critics concur and where they conflict, we equip ourselves to push the conversation further, hopefully approaching the kind of nuanced, humane understanding of depression (and of Wallace’s complex art) that this story, in all its hideousness and poignancy, seems to call for.
Sources
• Beyerstein, Lindsay. “The Best Thing Elizabeth Wurtzel Has Written About Depression (Hint: Not ‘Prozac Nation’).” In These Times, Jan. 7, 2013.
• Defossez, Ellen. “Unending Narrative, One-sided Empathy, and Problematic Contexts of Interaction in DFW’s ‘The Depressed Person’.” Journal of Medical Humanities 39.1 (2018): 15–27.
• Den Dulk, Allard. “What all she’d so painfully learned said about her: A comparative reading of DFW’s ‘The Depressed Person’ and Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground.” In Reading David Foster Wallace between Philosophy and Literature (Manchester UP, 2022).
• Elise, Kathleen. “‘The Depressed Person’ by David Foster Wallace.” Litro, 16 Oct. 2012.
• Footnotes in text: Excerpts from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (Back Bay Books, 1999).
• Hayes-Brady, Clare. The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace: Language, Identity, and Resistance (Bloomsbury, 2016).
• Lekesizalin, María. “Enjoying the Symptom: DFW’s Brief Interviews in the age of #MeToo.” Comparative Literature Essays (Dartmouth, 2020).
• Max, D. T. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (Viking, 2012).
• Morsia, E. “The Composition of ‘The Depressed Person’.” Textual Cultures 9.2 (2015): 79–99.
• Shirali, Ashira. “On ‘The Depressed Person,’ DFW, and the Art of Awful People.” Counterclock, 15 Jul. 2020.
• Singal, Jesse. “David Foster Wallace Wrote the Best and Worst Thing About Depression.” The Cut, 12 Sept. 2016.
• Smith, Zadie. “The Difficult Gifts of David Foster Wallace.” In Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (Penguin, 2009).
• Reddit discussion (r/literature): “Anyone want to discuss DFW’s Brief Interviews?” Aug. 2013.
• Wallace, David Foster. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (Little, Brown, 1999).
• Wallace, David Foster. “The Depressed Person.” Harper’s Magazine, Jan. 1998 (available online).