Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XI)
Overview of the Story and Its Themes
“Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XI)” is a flash-fiction piece (about 412 words) from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999) by David Foster Wallace. It is narrated in the first person and recounts the narrator’s recurring anxiety dream of suddenly being blind, and his ensuing emotional crisis upon waking. In the dream, an unidentified companion points out to him that he is blind – a revelation that causes the narrator to burst into tears. Even after awakening, he remains hypersensitive to his eyesight and deeply shaken. He spends the next day at work obsessing over the fragility of vision and the condition of blind people, feeling an “insufferable empathy” mixed with guilty relief that he can see. Overwhelmed by this epiphany, he leaves work early and collapses into bed, the story ending in a way that suggests a loop – he may fall asleep and dream of blindness yet again. Despite its brevity, critics note that this little story crystallizes many of Wallace’s recurring concerns: the boundaries between self and other, the vulnerabilities of the body, the paradox of empathy and solipsism, and the “infinite loops” of self-conscious thought.
Disability, Vulnerability, and Ethical Dissonance
Critics and scholars often highlight Porousness (XI) as a story about a sudden confrontation with disability and the moral emotions it triggers. In the narrator’s case, merely dreaming he is blind forces him to realize how thoughtlessly he had regarded blind people in waking life. He admits that he used to treat “those blind people” as casual curiosities – “interesting to spend a couple of seconds looking at” – without ever imagining any connection between their reality and his own. This confession reveals a kind of ethical dissonance or prior moral failure: he had been a voyeur of disability rather than an empathizer. Only after experiencing blindness within his own mind does he develop a “fragile” newfound empathy. Critics like Wojciech Drąg observe that the narrator’s sense of guilt at his past indifference mixes with relief at his “lucky coincidence” of being sighted. This blend of shame and gratitude creates an uneasy moral emotion – what Drąg calls an “emotional investment” beyond what one expects from such a short-short story. In fact, Drąg uses this piece as evidence that even ultrabrief fiction can elicit genuine empathic response in readers: in one survey, 79% of readers reported empathizing with the main character’s fear and guilt.
At the same time, some critics note an ironic edge to this “lesson” in empathy. James Wood, for example, points out that the blind persona in the story remains essentially an abstraction – the narrator’s empathy is triggered only by imagining himself in the disabled position. Wood argued that “even a little story like that” compels us to “think about the entrapment of solipsism”. In other words, the narrator’s compassionate awakening is still rooted in self-centered fear – he can only care once he believes it’s him – which suggests Wallace is also examining the limits of empathy. This tension between sincere compassion and self-interest is part of the ethical complexity of the story. Far from offering a comforting moral, the narrative leaves the protagonist in a kind of emotional limbo: he is enlightened but also incapacitated by guilt and anxiety. Several scholars (e.g. López-Sande) read this as Wallace problematizing empathy – showing how a sudden flood of empathy can be traumatic or “irreversibly detrimental” to one’s stable sense of self. The story’s title itself, invoking “porous” borders, hints that the boundary between self and other (abled and disabled, in this case) can open so abruptly that it destabilizes one’s identity and peace of mind.
Voyeurism, Observation, and Power Dynamics
The theme of voyeurism and “power through observation” is subtly woven into the story’s treatment of sight. Before his dream, the narrator was a passive observer of blind people – literally a voyeur of their difference. He “never thought they had anything to do with me or my eyes” and simply enjoyed the privilege of watching them from a distance. In Wallace’s broader work, the act of watching others (or being watched) is often tied to power dynamics and isolation. Here, the sighted narrator unknowingly occupied a position of power: he could see others, but failed to really see them as fellow humans. Critics have noted that Wallace often explores how the act of looking can objectify others – a dynamic of observer vs. observed that appears in many Brief Interviews stories about sexual predation and miscommunication. In Porousness (XI) this dynamic is upended. The narrator’s ability to see, formerly taken for granted as a source of orientation and even idle pleasure, becomes a source of intense fear. After the dream, he is “incredibly conscious” of his eyes and painfully aware “how fragile it all is…the human eye mechanism and the ability to see, how easily it could be lost”. The once-invisible “border” between the sighted and the blind has become “porous,” and the narrator is forced to recognize that he could easily have been – or could someday become – the vulnerable one on the other side of that divide.
Notably, it is the Other in the dream who forces this realization on him. As scholar Sergio López-Sande observes, all the “Porous Borders” stories involve self-awareness “prompted by the other’s bedeviling perspective on the self”. In (XI), the companion’s simple comment – “you’re blind” – instantly reverses the power dynamic: the narrator goes from feeling like an all-seeing subject to a disoriented object of someone else’s knowledge. He experiences what it is to be looked at (or at least pointed out) as “one of those blind people”. This role-reversal carries a whiff of voyeuristic discomfort for the narrator; he becomes, in a sense, the spectacle. Some analysts connect this moment to philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s idea that the human face and gaze of the Other demand an ethical response. Here Wallace gives that idea a twist – the Other’s “face” or perspective calls the narrator not to comfortable sympathy but to a kind of psychological violence against his previous complacency. The narrator’s reaction – uncontrollable tears and panic – underscores how powerful observation can be when the tables are turned. As López-Sande notes, Wallace is examining “what manner of perspectival self-consciousness arises” when we become aware that our own face or condition could easily have been the “helpless” one we normally gaze at from afar. In this sense the story is about power dynamics in empathy: the sighted person normally holds power (and distance) over the disabled person, but when that boundary blurs, the power dynamic collapses. The narrator is left feeling utterly exposed and powerless – observing his world now only fills him with dread and humility.
This theme of observation as power (or its loss) connects to other pieces in Brief Interviews. In fact, Wallace explores disability and manipulation explicitly in one of the titular “Brief Interviews”: a character known as “the guy with the physical disability” gleefully describes how he uses his impairment to guilt women into sex, leveraging their fear of seeming insensitive. It’s a disturbing example of disability as power-play – essentially weaponized voyeurism and pity. By contrast, Porousness (XI) offers a kind of mirror-image: an able-bodied man overwhelmed by pity and fear in relation to disability, with no hint of erotic or predatory subtext. Placed in the context of the collection’s many eroticized power dynamics (from manipulative seductions to a grotesque “rape as character-builder” monologue in another story), (XI) stands out for its lack of sexual content and its focus on a self-directed moral crisis. Some commentators have noted that this positioning feels deliberate. The “Porousness” vignettes act as a counterpoint to the hideous men’s monologues – they are brief glimpses of people (not necessarily “hideous”) who experience moments of human vulnerability or connection rather than overt domination. One blogger, reviewing the collection, observed that these recurring “Porousness” pieces help unify the book, adding sincere pathos to balance the darker sexual satire. In other words, (XI) has been seen as part of Wallace’s broader interrogation of power and empathy: who gets to look and who is seen, and what happens when those positions invert.
Bodily Perception, Performance, and Self-Consciousness
A major theme critics discuss in (XI) is how it portrays the mind’s recursive performance when confronting bodily reality. The story is intensely focused on the narrator’s bodily perception – specifically sight and its potential loss – and how this awareness spirals into an ever-intensifying feedback loop of thought. As soon as he wakes up crying, the narrator becomes performatively conscious of his crying itself, which “only aggravates his condition” in the dream and blurs his vision in reality. This sets off what López-Sande calls a “cycle that causes self-awareness to grow progressively more acute”: the more the narrator cries, the more he worries about his eyes, which makes him cry even harder. This vicious cycle is emblematic of Wallace’s fascination with recursive thought loops and anxiety. Critics have connected it to Wallace’s own descriptions of his panic attacks, which “quickly became endless loops” of worrying about the panic itself. It also parallels the predicaments of certain Wallace characters in other works: for example, Good Old Neon’s narrator who endlessly thinks himself into a corner of fraudulence, or David Cusk in The Pale King, whose desperate fear of sweating in public only makes him sweat more. In Porousness (XI), the “porous border” can be seen as the collapsing boundary between the narrator’s physical state and his mental state – his body’s reactions feed his mind’s distress, and vice versa, in an infinite regress. The story’s very structure reinforces this: it ends with the narrator exhausted in bed at 4pm, poised to “begin again” (possibly by dreaming of blindness once more). The lack of a neat conclusion (no comfort or solution is offered) aligns with what Rob Morsia and others identify as Wallace’s penchant for the “deliberately unfinished” in Brief Interviews. The numbered title (XI) itself implies both an arbitrary fragment of a larger sequence and, symbolically, an open cycle (since we never see I–X or XII–XXIII in the book).
Scholars have indeed positioned the “Porous Borders” series as an exploration of performative self-consciousness. López-Sande’s study in the Journal of the Short Story in English notes that all these tales dramatize “the ever-playful relationship between self and other” and how “expression and speech can be rendered dysfunctional by personal circumstance”. In (XI), the narrator’s normal daily performance – going to work, interacting with his girlfriend – breaks down under the weight of his interior loop. He “cannot function normally at work” because his perspective has been irreversibly altered. There is a sense that he is acting through the motions of office life while internally consumed by thoughts of blindness. Eventually the performance collapses and he gives up, going home to hide in bed. This resonates with Wallace’s broader theme of performativity and its failure. Many Wallace characters wear psychological “masks” or maintain routines to conceal their private struggles until some crisis (often involving another person’s gaze or comment) exposes them. Here, the narrator’s attempt to “hold it together” after the dream lasts only until the burden of self-consciousness – the awareness of how precarious his normalcy is – becomes too heavy.
It’s worth noting that, unlike most stories in Brief Interviews, (XI) is not overtly metafictional or explicitly about “performance” in a theatrical sense. Yet, some readers have interpreted the dream framework and the dialogic title (“Yet Another Example…”) as a self-aware narrative gesture. The title winks at the reader by presenting the story as one example among many, almost as if Wallace the author is onstage introducing a demonstration of “porous borders.” This has led a few critics to see these vignettes as Wallace performing sincerity in contrast to the ironic performances of the “hideous men.” For instance, literary scholar Adam Kelly (known for identifying Wallace’s “New Sincerity”) suggests that the challenge in these stories is to overcome fractured communication and achieve genuine empathy. From that angle, the very rawness of (XI) – its single-character, unfiltered emotional meltdown – is a kind of anti-performance, a moment of unfeigned human vulnerability nestled amid more stylized pieces. One neglected reading of (XI) could further this idea by examining the gendered aspect of the performance: in a collection filled with men performing misogyny, sexuality, or toxic bravado, here we have a male narrator openly weeping, admitting fear, and leaning on a caring girlfriend. This subversion of masculine performance isn’t often discussed, but it adds another “porous border” worth exploring – the border between the typical “hideous man” persona and a more traditionally “feminine” emotional openness. The story’s quiet dramatization of a man’s tearful breakdown can thus be read as Wallace undermining the performance of male invulnerability that he elsewhere critiques.
Interpretive Consensus and Debates
Over the years, a critical consensus has formed that Porousness (XI), while brief, is a significant piece illustrating Wallace’s key motifs of empathy, self-consciousness, and the longing to connect beyond the self. It is frequently cited in academic discussions: for example, Wojciech Drąg and Adam Kelly both view it as exemplifying Wallace’s effort to bridge the gap between isolated individuals through fiction. The story shows “the possibility for empathy,” as López-Sande puts it, in a world of otherwise narcissistic interior monologues. In Brief Interviews overall, most characters are locked in solipsism or abusive power-games, but (XI) offers a counterpoint where a character is forced out of his selfish shell (however painfully) to acknowledge another perspective. Many commentators agree that this aligns with Wallace’s larger ethical project – an attempt to move literature beyond irony toward sincere human concern. The image of the crying narrator unable to stop his tears has been called one of the “most poignant” illustrations of the self-other relationship in Wallace’s short fiction. It viscerally captures what Wallace once described as the paradox of really imagining another’s pain: it can “scare the everliving shit” out of us by confronting us with truths we’d rather ignore. Thus, critics commonly interpret the story as Wallace’s way of probing the cost of empathy – that true openness to others can be destabilizing, yet it might be the only antidote to the loneliness and “entrapment of solipsism” his work so often decries.
That said, there are some disagreements and varying emphases in the discourse. While scholars tend to read (XI) as earnest and even optimistic in its ethical thrust, popular reception has been mixed regarding its literary impact. Some readers find it moving and memorable; others find it underwhelming or slight. For instance, blogger-reviewer “Kalafudra” admitted that these “Porousness” pieces were “nothing wrong” but ultimately “just not enough” for her – she craved a longer, more developed story to fully engage with, and thus felt (XI) and its sister pieces didn’t stick with her beyond an appreciation for Wallace’s style. This reflects a common reaction in informal discussions: compared to weightier stories in the collection (like “The Depressed Person” or the elaborate Brief Interviews dialogues), (XI) can feel like a minor interlude or a thematic placeholder. In fact, some early reviewers of Brief Interviews barely mentioned these micro-stories at all, focusing instead on the more dramatic or comedic entries.
However, critical readers have lately given (XI) more attention by situating it within Wallace’s wider oeuvre and even his biography. As noted, James Wood (once a skeptic of Wallace’s pyrotechnic style) praised (XI) during a 2010 lecture, calling it a “wonderful bit of writing” that showcases the “helplessness of the self” and the traps of overactive consciousness. Wood’s acknowledgment is telling – he recognized that even in a “little story” Wallace’s moral voice comes through clearly. Meanwhile, academic Sergio López-Sande’s 2020 analysis links (XI) and its companion pieces to philosophical concepts (Levinas’s face, Ricoeur’s selfhood, Johan Galtung’s violence typologies) to argue that Wallace is mapping how psychological violence can stem from ordinary human interactions and perceptions. Such readings push beyond seeing (XI) as just a standalone sketch; they position it as a deliberate part of Wallace’s “short story cycle” architecture and his long-running exploration of intersubjectivity (how selves relate to others). There is emerging scholarly interest in how the “Porous Borders” series (scattered and renumbered as they are) form a covert backbone in Wallace’s story collections – each illustrating a different “border” (between parent and child in (XXIV), between spouses in (VI), between abled and disabled in (XI), etc.) and how those borders can be crossed or collapsed. This perspective encourages new interpretations, for example reading (XI) alongside the later story “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” (originally titled “Porousness (VIII)”) which deals with a mother’s disfigured face and the trauma of seeing and being seen. In both, faces and eyes become sources of existential distress, suggesting Wallace’s broader preoccupation with the body as a conduit of meaning and misunderstanding.
A potentially neglected angle in existing discourse is a disability-studies critique of how the story frames blindness. Most commentary views the narrative from the sighted narrator’s perspective (naturally, since that is the POV provided). But one could question the implications of portraying blind people as voiceless figures who exist mainly to spur an epiphany in an able-bodied person. The narrator refers to blind individuals in passing, even after his change of heart, as “those blind people I see on the subway” – notably othering language that might merit analysis. Does the story ultimately reinforce a patronizing view of disability (the blind as pitiable “others”) even as it urges empathy? Or is it critiquing that very attitude? Because Wallace gives us only the narrator’s internal monologue, we never hear from a blind character; the “porous border” here is crossed only in a one-way direction (the sighted person imaginatively experiences blindness). Some readers might argue that true reciprocity or understanding isn’t achieved – the narrator ends in a kind of fetal position of despair rather than, say, actually reaching out to a blind person or doing something constructive. In this sense, his empathy is left abstract and self-centered, which could be seen as a subtle commentary on the limits of privileged guilt. While this line of interpretation hasn’t been front-and-center in published criticism, it could challenge the more positive takes by asking whether Wallace is intentionally showing a failed or incomplete empathy. The fact that the narrator’s girlfriend is present, comforting and “concerned,” also opens questions: she represents a caring response from another person, but we see the narrator is still fundamentally alone in his head, unable to fully engage even with her support. The story leaves us with a man who has awakened morally but remains psychologically paralyzed – an ambiguity that future interpretations could explore in terms of what action, if any, Wallace expects from such moments of awakening.
In summary, “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XI)” has generated a rich array of discourse across academic, critical, and fan communities. Consensus holds that it poignantly depicts a collision between the self and the Other that leads to empathy, anxiety, and heightened self-awareness – encapsulating Wallace’s thematic shift toward sincerity and human connection in a post-ironic age. There is broad agreement that the story’s focus on blindness is really a means of examining how we see (or don’t see) each other as fellow humans, aligning with Wallace’s recurring concern about escaping the “default setting” of one’s own head. At the same time, critical debates persist around the story’s tone and import. Some view it as sincerely affirmative – a small but meaningful victory of conscience over indifference – while others see it as a portrayal of empathy’s pain and inadequacy, perhaps even a sly indictment of the narrator’s self-absorption (he cries for himself as much as for anyone else). And while many commentators tie the piece into Wallace’s ethical project, a few readers shrug it off as a slight sketch, suggesting its full potential comes only when we connect it to the wider constellation of Wallace’s stories and concerns.
Conclusion: Position in Wallace’s Oeuvre
Placed in the context of Wallace’s broader narrative preoccupations – performativity, self-consciousness, recursive thought, and the power of observation – Porousness (XI) serves as a microcosm of these ideas at work. It portrays a character caught in a “loop” of awareness that is at once self-centered and profoundly affecting, echoing Wallace’s larger motif of minds that cannot stop analyzing themselves. It dramatizes a moment when the “mask” of normalcy drops, akin to other Wallace characters who suddenly perceive their own performance of self (one is reminded of the moment in Infinite Jest when Hal Incandenza becomes cripplingly self-conscious of being observed, or when Wallace’s essayistic narrators catch themselves performing). And it literalizes “power through observation” by showing how the act of seeing (and losing that power to see) reconfigures a person’s world. As Elliott Murphy notes, in one stroke the narrator becomes “super conscious” of the gift of sight and acutely aware of “how easily it could be lost,” a fragile privilege he had never examined. This insight ties neatly into Wallace’s career-long examination of consciousness itself as a trap and a key – here consciousness expands (to include others’ suffering) but also ensnares (in dread and remorse).
Critics like López-Sande argue that the “Porous Borders” stories collectively emphasize intersubjective encounters and the often painful enlightenment they bring. In (XI) the intersubjective encounter is indirect (via a dream figure), but its impact is real and devastating. In effect, Wallace uses this brief tale to “weaponize” empathy – turning the narrator’s newfound insight into a source of agony that nonetheless carries a moral truth. Such complexity is very much in line with Wallace’s style in Brief Interviews, a collection that, as a whole, asks whether genuine understanding between people is possible in a climate of performed personas and cynical games. Porousness (XI) tentatively answers that it is possible – the narrator does achieve a moment of understanding the world of the blind – but it underscores the cost of that understanding in personal terms. The story leaves us with a question characteristic of Wallace’s fiction: what do we do after we’ve recognized the humanity of the Other? In this case, the text itself loops back, suggesting perhaps that this realization is not one-and-done, but something the narrator (and by extension, the reader) must confront repeatedly.
In conclusion, the discourse around “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XI)” reveals it to be a deceptively small story that opens up large issues. Academics have illuminated its themes of identity, violence, and face-to-face ethics ; critics have appreciated its moral seriousness and linkage to Wallace’s fight against solipsism ; and informal readers have drawn personal connections to its emotional punch (or occasionally, lack thereof). Through interpretations focusing on disability, eroticism, power, voyeurism, bodily awareness, performance, and ethics, the story has been positioned both as a standalone sketch of a man’s inner breakdown and as a piece in the broader puzzle of Wallace’s narrative world – a world where the borders between minds are permeable but fraught. The critical consensus acknowledges the story’s heartfelt exploration of empathy and self-awareness, while debates highlight whether that empathy is fundamentally redemptive or entrapping. These discussions, alongside neglected angles like the story’s commentary on disability representation or gendered vulnerability, suggest that Porousness (XI) still holds potential for new readings. In any case, it undeniably exemplifies Wallace’s ability to “radiate” both pathos and insight in a very compressed form, inviting us – much like the narrator – to spend a few unsettled moments seeing our world a little differently, with our customary borders temporarily dissolved.
Sources
• Wojciech Drąg, “Cutting to the Chase: Microfictions, Empathy and the New Sincerity,” Brno Studies in English 44.1 (2018): Discusses Wallace’s flash fiction and notes that in Porousness (XI) the narrator becomes hyper-aware of “the fragility of eyesight” and feels guilt for never having empathized with blind people before. Emphasizes the story’s success in eliciting reader empathy, citing survey data.
• 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 (Autumn 2020): Provides a detailed analysis of all the “Porousness” stories. Interprets (XI) as a case where a protagonist is “forced into awareness by the other,” becoming hypersensitive to his sense of sight after dreaming of blindness. Describes the “cycle” of crying and growing self-consciousness as a key image of how exposure to the Other’s perspective creates an “unending loop” of anxiety. Links this to Wallace’s broader themes of intersubjective trauma and the unfinished, looping structure of the stories.
• James Wood, remarks at 92Y “First Reads: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” (March 2010), reported by Edward Champion on Reluctant Habits: Wood – a prominent critic – singled out the “blind character” in (XI) and noted that “even a little story like that” prompts reflection on “the entrapment of solipsism,” illustrating Wallace’s portrayal of the “helplessness of the self”. He praised the writing as “wonderful,” aligning it with the moral weight in Wallace’s work and comparing its mix of “funny and intolerable” emotions to authors like Lydia Davis and Beckett.
• Elliot Murphy, “Infinite Jest: Putting the ‘a’ in ‘a priori’” (2014, online essay): In a discussion of Wallace’s themes of embodiment, Murphy quotes Porousness (XI) to exemplify Wallace’s focus on the body and perception. The narrator’s line about being “incredibly conscious of my eyesight… and of how fragile it all is” and realizing it’s “just a lucky coincidence that I can see” is highlighted as an instance of suddenly appreciating the body and acknowledging previously ignored others. Murphy connects this to Wallace’s broader concern that modern people treat the body as an object or mechanism until something shatters that illusion.
• Philo on Books (blog), Brief Interviews with Hideous Men review (2016): Offers a plot summary of (XI) – describing it as “less than two pages long” about someone who “regularly dreams he’s blind” and is “extremely grateful that he’s not blind in real life” the next day. While light on analysis, this reflects a common informal understanding of the story’s gist (a poignant scenario about appreciating one’s senses). The blogger also notes the structural role of the “Porousness” vignettes in the book and describes (XXIV) as highly abstract , showing that readers see these pieces as experimental, puzzle-like fragments in Wallace’s collection.
• Biblioklept (Edwin Turner), “Essential Short Story Collections: Brief Interviews…” (2008): A playful blog post advocating Wallace’s book. It cites a snippet of dialogue from Porousness (VI) (a squabbling couple about to divorce) to illustrate Wallace’s range. Turner suggests the “Porousness” series helps “unify the book’s structure,” making it more than just a set of disparate stories. Implicitly, this view positions (XI) and its siblings as thematic threads (in this case, each “Yet Another Example…” being an instance of human relationships under extreme pressure or absurdity). It indicates an informal consensus that these vignettes carry symbolic weight beyond their size.
• Kalafudra’s Blog (2012 review of Brief Interviews): Provides brief reactions to each story. On (XI), the blogger simply notes: “This is again very short, but I like his style.” On (VI) she remarks that she prefers longer stories – “there’s nothing wrong with it, but it just isn’t enough”. Such remarks exemplify a segment of readers who admire Wallace’s prose but feel these ultra-short pieces are more like intriguing anecdotes than fully satisfying narratives. It’s an informal counterpoint to academic enthusiasm: the story’s effect can depend on the reader’s tolerance for open-ended, minimalist fiction.
• Edward Jackson and Joel Nickels, “David Foster Wallace in Context” (Cambridge UP, 2022) – Contextual snippet: One chapter (likely on aesthetics or phenomenology) apparently notes that a character in “Yet Another Instance of the Porousness of Certain Borders” (an alternate wording of the title) “acts as proxy, using the seeming simplicity of color to practice the difficult art of appreciation”, followed by the narrator’s quote about being “super conscious” of eyesight and color. This suggests a reading of (XI) as a kind of didactic or illustrative piece – the narrator stands in for the reader or author, demonstrating how one might learn gratitude for the basic ability to see (colors, faces, the world). While we couldn’t access the full text, this context source aligns with others in seeing (XI) as a story about mindfulness and appreciation born of crisis, positioning it in a tradition of literature that uses disability as metaphor or thought-experiment to jolt characters (and readers) into valuing what they have.
• Reluctant Habits (Ed Champion), “James Wood on DFW” (2010) and López-Sande (2020) for analysis of the story’s self-conscious emotional loop and Wallace’s “infinite loops” motif.
• Philoonbooks for the summary of the Brief Interviews vignette about a man exploiting his disability, illustrating Wallace’s different approach to disability and power elsewhere in the book.