Think
Critical Reception and Major Interpretations
Upon the 1999 release of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, critics noted Wallace’s unorthodox style and sharp insight into modern relationships. The collection was seen as a satire of American male ego and solipsism – one reviewer described Wallace’s “hideous men” as “monstrous, parodic versions of Updikean characters” driven by a peculiarly American strain of egoism. At the same time, many praised Wallace’s ingenuity and depth. For example, The Guardian lauded the stories for concealing “surprisingly wise insights into the quirks and self-deceptions of consumer society, and particularly the oddities of the ways in which the sexes view each other”. “Think,” in particular, has attracted appreciative analysis for its brief but powerful depiction of a moment of moral and emotional crisis.
Literary critics and writers have offered significant interpretations of “Think.” Novelist Zadie Smith, in an extended essay on Wallace’s work, singled out “Think” as a prime example of the author’s emotional counterpoint. She observes that the story’s protagonist – a “potentially hideous” married man about to commit adultery – undergoes “a type of revelation” that subverts the expected trajectory. As the young woman approaches him “half naked, with ‘a slight smile…media-taught’,” the man suddenly drops to his knees in an attitude of prayer, startling her. Smith reads this as Wallace turning a clichéd seduction into a deeper plea for genuine human connection. In her analysis, the man is less afraid of the sin of infidelity than of the falsity of enacting a “media-taught” sexual scenario – he fears “living a cliché” more than moral failure. By kneeling, he seeks to “feel like a human being…humbled, and really connected” rather than just a player in a stock scenario. This interpretation frames “Think” as a story about the hunger for authenticity in an overly mediated age. Indeed, Smith argues that throughout Brief Interviews, Wallace’s male characters share a terror not of intimacy, but of the absence of real emotional connection. They may seem glib or misogynistic on the surface, but at heart “they are terrified of the possibility of no emotional connection…far more than misogyny” – they “know the words for everything and the meaning of nothing,” in Smith’s striking phrase. In “Think,” the man’s unexpected act of humility can be seen as a bid to break this pattern and find meaning beyond the scripted words and images.
Academic Analyses: Form, Tone, and Thematic Content
Scholarly commentators have also examined “Think” for its form and themes, often noting how its brevity and narrative technique invite reader interpretation. The story is very short (only a few pages) and told in third-person but with an intimate focus on the man’s perceptions. Notably, the text withholds the exact content of the pivotal exchange between the characters. The young woman’s “three-word question” (implied to be “What the fuck?”) is never explicitly quoted, nor is the man’s private thought revealed when he tells her, “It’s not what you think I’m afraid of”. This deliberate omission creates an open space that the reader must fill in, effectively making us “imagine what is happening in his head…putting [ourselves] in his place”, as the narration itself suggests. Literature scholars have pointed out that this tactic – requiring the audience to actively intuit the characters’ inner lives – is characteristic of Wallace’s approach to fiction. It aligns with Wallace’s interest in “new sincerity,” a mode of writing that resists irony by forging an earnest connection with the reader. As one analysis notes, “we are not told what the man thinks…instead, this job is left to us, the readers”, a method that compels us to empathize and thus “completes” the story’s emotional arc. In this way, the form of “Think” is a kind of narrative puzzle: by leaving crucial thoughts unspoken, Wallace forces the reader to participate in the moral and emotional reasoning at the story’s climax. The tone remains understated and tense, until it blossoms into a moment of startling vulnerability.
Thematic content in “Think” has been richly discussed in academic essays and theses. A recurring observation is the story’s commentary on spectacle versus sincerity. The text explicitly draws attention to how the characters perform roles learned from media. The young seductress’s every move and expression seems calculated from pop-culture templates – “Her expression is from Page 18 of the Victoria’s Secret catalogue” and “she’s replaying a scene from some movie she loves”, the narrator notes. Scholars argue that this highlights the story’s critique of how mass media scripts our intimate behaviors. One study of body language in Wallace’s fiction remarks that in “Think,” “nonverbal communication has been hijacked by commodified sexual imagery from advertisements”. The male protagonist recognizes these tropes (he “is aware of the conventions of this imagery” ), yet this awareness offers him no genuine satisfaction or guidance. The form of the story reinforces this theme by interweaving a collective perspective: at one point the narration shifts to say, “We see these things a dozen times a day in entertainment but imagine we ourselves…are mad”. In other words, the story knowingly blurs the line between the character’s individual experience and the reader’s own media-saturated imagination. This formal choice – a kind of second-person plural address – underlines the idea that both the character and the audience are grappling with the same cultural scripts. Ultimately, Wallace uses a concise, “puzzle-like narrative structure” (as the Los Angeles Review of Books noted ) to explore big questions of authenticity, using tone and form that oscillate between clinical detachment and aching sincerity.
Wallace’s Own Commentary and Intent
David Foster Wallace did not often explicate his own short stories in detail, but his interviews and essays shed light on the intentions behind pieces like “Think.” Broadly speaking, Wallace saw fiction as an arena to expose the difficulties of being genuine in contemporary America. In a well-known conversation with Larry McCaffery, he said that if modern U.S. life makes it “distinctively hard to be a real human being,” then “half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what makes it tough” and “the other half is to dramatize the fact that we still are human beings, now. Or can be.”. “Think” can be viewed as exactly this kind of double dramatization. It lays bare what makes it tough – the scene is suffused with superficial, scripted sexuality that threatens to reduce two people to cliches – and it also shows a flicker of authentic humanity in the man’s yearning to reconnect with “real” feeling. The story’s climax (the man kneeling and effectively praying for genuine connection) embodies what Wallace described as fiction’s duty to “illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human” even in dark or absurd situations.
Wallace’s nonfiction and interviews often critiqued how media and pop culture inculcate ironic distance, which is directly relevant to “Think.” In his 1993 essay E Unibus Pluram, he argued that constant exposure to television’s slick imagery makes sincere human interaction feel alien or embarrassing. The male protagonist of “Think” clearly experiences this alienation: he feels that the moment he’s in is “falsity…living a cliché”, as Smith puts it. The character’s impulse to break the script – to kneel – can be seen as an attempt to overcome what Wallace once called “our aesthetic childishness” trained by TV. Moreover, Wallace frequently spoke about the need for fiction to bridge the gap between selves. He told McCaffery that great fiction should “allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain…[so] we become less alone inside”. In “Think,” the narrative explicitly challenges both the female character and the reader to attempt that imaginative leap of empathy – to “try putting herself in his place…Even for an instant”. Wallace’s comment that serious art might make us “work hard to access its pleasures” is also pertinent: “Think” is crafted to withhold easy satisfaction (there is no tidy conclusion or spelled-out moral), instead rewarding readers who engage with its subtle cues. While Wallace did not comment on “Think” in isolation, his general stance on fiction’s purpose – to combat solipsism and invoke genuine feeling – illuminates the story’s intent. In short, “Think” embodies Wallace’s fear not of sentiment, but of its absence: as Zadie Smith observed, his writing is “terrified of the possibility of no emotional connection” and yearns to prove that true understanding between people is still possible.
Gender Dynamics, Performance, Guilt, Power, and Media Influence
“Think” offers a compact yet incisive look at a charged encounter between a man and a woman, raising questions about gender roles, performativity, guilt, power, and the sway of media. The basic scenario – a married man alone with “the younger sister of his wife’s college roommate” in a bedroom, about to commit adultery – immediately establishes an unequal power dynamic and transgressive sexual tension. The man is older and holds a position of trust he’s about to violate, while the younger woman actively orchestrates the seduction. In the portrayal, however, Wallace complicates any simple predator–prey narrative. The young woman is depicted not as an innocent ingénue but as a conscious agent who “tries to act seductively,” armed with cultural knowledge of how to appear desirable. She stands before him “half naked” with a “slight and smoky” smile “media-taught” – clearly performing a role she has learned from societal scripts of female sexuality. This emphasis on performance shows how both characters are, in a sense, playing parts: she plays the temptress, and he is expected to play the lustful adulterer. Wallace’s narration highlights the artificiality of it all. The woman’s facial expressions and even her body positioning are likened to advertisement images (Victoria’s Secret catalog poses) and movie scenes. By calling out these references, the text underscores how media influence permeates their real-life interaction – the characters are almost hyper-aware that they are enacting a soft-core cinematic cliché.
In terms of gender dynamics, Wallace uses irony and inversion. Traditionally, one might expect the male to wield power in a sexual advance scenario; yet in “Think,” the man abruptly relinquishes that dominant role by kneeling. His sudden genuflection is jarring: the woman herself responds with incredulity (“What the fuck?” – a profane quid pro quo to his inexplicable behavior). In that moment, the power balance shifts. The man’s posture is one of supplication and vulnerability, which could imply remorse or reverence, whereas the woman’s confidence is punctured by confusion. This reversal invites us to question stereotypes: the “hideous man” reveals a capacity for humility, and the femme fatale is left unsure and questioning. Guilt is a palpable subtext here – the man imagines “his wife and son” at the crucial moment of temptation , suggesting a stab of conscience. Yet tellingly, his guilt is not merely the conventional moral guilt over infidelity. As the text and critics indicate, he is “not afraid of what [she] thinks” (i.e. getting caught or sinning); rather, “It’s not what you think I’m afraid of,” he says enigmatically. His fear is more existential – a guilt or dread at the inauthenticity of the situation. In other words, he feels guilty about playing a dehumanizing game, about being just another sleazy cliché of a cheating husband. This nuanced portrayal of guilt elevates the story from a simple morality tale to a meditation on personal integrity and self-alienation.
Throughout the scene, media imagery and gender performance intertwine with power. The woman’s empowerment comes partially from mimicking images that entice men; the man’s disempowerment comes from recognizing those images and suddenly rejecting them. He perceives that “in this moment, nonverbal communication [has] been hijacked by commodified sexual imagery” – everything the woman does feels second-hand, scripted. His decision to kneel is arguably an attempt to reclaim authenticity in a dynamic that has been pre-scripted by culture. It’s as if he tries to break the fourth wall of their “movie.” Notably, the final narrative lines imagine a path to empathy: “What if she joined him on the floor, just like this, clasped in supplication: just this way”. By literally putting herself in his place (physically mirroring his submissive pose), the woman might understand his mindset. Here Wallace suggests that true connection or equality between the genders in this moment would require a mutual vulnerability that cancels the power play. The story thus deftly critiques the power imbalances inherent in sexual gamesmanship – he only finds a genuine meeting of minds conceivable when both characters abandon their roles (seducer and conqueror) and meet on their knees as equals. In summation, “Think” uses a single charged encounter to explore how men and women perform identities under the influence of media, how that performance can rob their interaction of real intimacy, and how breaking the script – through an act of humility or empathy – might restore a measure of human truth.
Comparison to Other Stories in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Stylistically and thematically, “Think” both connects with and stands apart from other stories in the Brief Interviews collection. One immediate comparison is with the story that follows it in the book, “Signifying Nothing.” Both are relatively short pieces that deal with misunderstood actions and the challenge of interpreting meaning, especially in fraught sexual or familial situations. “Signifying Nothing” is narrated by a young man recalling a disturbing childhood incident (his father exposing himself to him unexpectedly), and it shares with “Think” a fascination with nonverbal cues and social scripts. As one scholar notes, “Think” and “Signifying Nothing” both focus on situations where two people are communicating…and there is some form of a communication breakdown. In “Think,” the breakdown is between sexual partners due to conflicting perceptions; in “Signifying Nothing,” it is between father and son due to an inexplicable gesture. However, the tone and narrative voice of the two stories differ markedly. “Think” is told in a restrained third person, creating a tense, voyeuristic atmosphere, whereas “Signifying Nothing” opens in a breezy, colloquial first person (with a line like “Here is a weird one for you” setting a conversational tone ). This contrast exemplifies Wallace’s range: Brief Interviews as a whole is “difficult to categorise, roaming wilfully across the boundaries of genres” , and “Think” represents the more minimalist, impersonal end of that spectrum compared to the chatty, confessional style of some other pieces.
“Think” also resonates with stories like “Adult World (I)” and “Adult World (II)”, which explore sexual relationships and the influence of pornographic or pop-cultural expectations. In “Adult World,” a newlywed woman, plagued by anxieties about pleasing her husband, turns to the guidance of glossy magazines and ends up comically misconstruing her husband’s needs – a scenario Wallace presents with dark humor and meta-fictional footnotes. Both “Adult World” and “Think” highlight how media and cultural scripts mediate personal intimacy: in “Adult World” it leads to farce and confusion, in “Think” to a moment of crisis and spiritual yearning. The difference lies in execution: “Adult World” is lengthy, metafictional, and uses footnotes extensively, even splitting into two parts (the second part being essentially commentary on the first). “Think,” by contrast, is concise and leaves much unsaid, though both demand the reader’s active engagement (e.g. “Adult World (II)” essentially asks the reader to reconsider Part I with a different perspective, just as “Think” asks the reader to imagine the man’s unspoken fear).
Within Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, the titular “Brief Interviews” vignettes form another point of contrast. Those sections are presented as transcripts of interviews (with only the men’s responses given), often highlighting misogyny, manipulative behavior, or emotional emptiness in an explicitly dialogic format. “Think” is not structured as an interview, yet it thematically mirrors the hideous men concept by scrutinizing a man at a moral crossroad. Unlike some interviewees in the collection who revel in or justify their hideous behavior, the man in “Think” is on the verge of acting badly but instead recoils in self-awareness. This gives “Think” a more redemptive or hopeful note than many stories in the book. Critics have noted that Wallace’s male characters typically “add up to a…vivid portrait of the American male and his view of women”. In that gallery, the protagonist of “Think” might be considered one of the more sympathetic portraits – he actually seeks meaning beyond objectifying the woman in front of him. This aligns with Zadie Smith’s claim that Wallace’s men are all, in their own way, desperate to break out of solipsism. By contrast, a story like “Brief Interviews #20” (the notorious monologue of a man who uses a fake feminist sensitivity to ensnare women) shows a man doubling down on manipulation and egotism. Think diverges by depicting a man who is disgusted with the cliché of such manipulations.
In terms of style, “Think” is one of the more traditionally narrated pieces in Brief Interviews, lacking footnotes, fragmented structure, or overt metafictional devices. In that sense it can be compared to “The Depressed Person”, another story in the collection that uses a more classic narrative voice (albeit with heavy use of clinical, repetitive language as a device). While “The Depressed Person” delves into the interior misery and self-centeredness of its protagonist at great length, “Think” is almost its mirror image: extremely brief and focused on a flash of insight that could lead out of self-absorption. The stylistic economy of “Think” – its snapshot-like quality – has led some to call it “elliptical” or “puzzle-like”. Indeed, one commentary notes that Wallace seemed to enjoy “unorthodox, sometimes puzzle-like narrative structures” in this collection. “Think” exemplifies that by essentially withholding the solution (the full meaning of the man’s revelation) and asking readers to supply it. In contrast, a story like “Octet” overtly addresses the reader with metafictional questions and even acknowledges its own “failure” to communicate clearly, thereby making the puzzle explicit. “Think” is more subtle – it has a conventional surface (a third-person scene) but a gap at its heart. In summary, within Brief Interviews, “Think” stands out for its brevity, sincerity, and open-endedness, yet it reinforces the collection’s broader themes of failed communication, gender conflict, and the yearning for authenticity among the savvy, disaffected characters of late-90s America.
Overlooked Dimensions and Lesser-Known Insights
Beyond the major critical narratives, “Think” contains nuances that some commentary has overlooked. One such dimension is the story’s subtext of spirituality or grace. While it’s clear that the man’s kneeling has a figurative meaning (humility, supplication), it is also literally a prayer-like posture. The text explicitly uses religious language – “clasped in supplication” – to describe what the man desires: that the woman might join him in a moment of mutual vulnerability. This hint of the spiritual resonates with Wallace’s broader interest in the possibility of transcendence or “something real” beyond irony. In an interview, Wallace once mused that “fiction is one of the places (along with religion, maybe) where we can talk about spiritual values”. In “Think,” the man’s rejection of adulterous pleasure in favor of a seemingly absurd act of kneeling could be read as a search for a kind of secular grace – an unexpected route to recover genuine feeling. Few critics explicitly label “Think” as spiritual, but the imagery of prayer and the theme of redemption (however brief) suggest that Wallace was, characteristically, fusing the spiritual with the mundane. Zadie Smith’s essay even connects this moment to Wallace’s notion that some truths lie beyond ordinary language – she quotes Wallace saying, “I think that God has particular languages… one of them is music and one of them is mathematics”. The silent understanding the man seeks may be one of those wordless truths that fiction (another language of God, perhaps) strives to capture.
Another insight often missed is how the title “Think” itself is an ironic prompt. The story pointedly does not tell us what the character is thinking at the climax. By entitling it “Think,” Wallace effectively commands the reader to do so. It’s a clever authorial trick that aligns the reader’s experience with the female character’s – just as she is challenged to imagine the man’s mindset, so are we. This narrative gap exemplifies Wallace’s technique of “radical reader involvement” (a hallmark of the so-called “New Sincerity” movement in fiction ). Adam Kelly, a scholar of Wallace, argues that Wallace’s texts often hinge on “undecidability and the affective response they invite in their reader.” “Think” is an embodiment of that principle: it withholds a central piece of data (what exactly the man’s revelation is), thereby creating an undecidable moment that provokes the reader’s own imaginative and emotional response. In this sense, an overlooked aspect of “Think” is how it turns the reader into an active participant in its moral drama. The story isn’t just about a man and a woman in a room; it’s also about a reader being made self-aware of their role in completing the story’s meaning. This level of engagement is easy to bypass on a first read, but it’s a key part of what gives “Think” its lingering power despite being only a few hundred words long.
Lastly, some commentators have noted how “Think” can be seen as Wallace’s subversion of the classic adultery narrative common in mid-century American lit. Authors like John Updike frequently wrote about adultery in a way that emphasized erotic bravado or midlife malaise, sometimes glamorizing the affair as a profound if illicit passion. Wallace, who famously critiqued Updike’s “Great Male Narcissist” tendencies, flips the script in “Think.” Instead of reveling in the illicit romance, Wallace elliptically deflates it. The build-up (a seduction seemingly straight out of a mediocre movie) is in full swing, but the payoff (sexual consummation) never arrives. In its place is an awkward, human moment of confusion and longing. One scholarly take (in Global Wallace: David Foster Wallace and World Literature) suggests that “Think” “reworks the elliptically traumatic adulteries of John Updike”, stripping away their illusion of excitement to reveal the emptiness beneath. By doing so, Wallace offers a critique that might be missed by readers expecting a more straightforward erotic narrative. The real climax of “Think” is interior and ethical, not sexual – a point which might be understated in general discussions of the story. In sum, the “hidden” richness of “Think” lies in how much it accomplishes beneath the surface: it’s a satirical commentary on mediated sexuality, a micro-allegory about sincerity, a role-reversal drama about gender and power, and even a quiet spiritual parable. All these layers make “Think” a particularly rewarding subject for deep research and explain why, more than twenty years later, it continues to invite fresh interpretation and appreciation.
Sources
Critical analysis and interpretations by Zadie Smith ; academic commentary on Brief Interviews and “Think” ; contemporary reviews in The Guardian ; Wallace’s interview with Larry McCaffery ; Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (Little, Brown, 1999).