Even in nonfiction prose, authors find many different ways to tell us about themselves. They may directly describe their personality traits or they may indirectly show these traits through their word choice, their attitudes towards the subject matter and their reported (or admitted) behavior. As such, the personality of the author becomes evident in their works and social interactions. What is commonly referred to as “personality” in a real person is called “persona” in writing. This essay describes the persona of David Foster Wallace’s authorial persona as evidenced in his essays and his social life and interactions with the people. The persona is drawn from Wallace’s 1997 novel A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. In derivative sport in tornado alley, the narrator tells the story of a boy who grew up in difficulties and great limitations but one who had great personality that included humor, creativity, boldness and curiousness.
David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) was an American storyteller, novelist, essayist and professor of English. Although he ended his life through suicide details emerged of his long struggle with depression and it had a lot to do with his persona as a highly analytical person. A movie titled “the end of the tour” was released in 2015 features a 5-day interview between David Foster Wallace and Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky. The film came to light after Wallace released his groundbreaking novel titled “Infinite jest”.
In his hugely successful book A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Wallace shows brilliance as he tries and eventually excels in playing tennis in the central Midwest where there were furious winds that could have worked against his inborn deficiencies of becoming a good tennis player. In an interesting twist, his extreme interest in mathematics and physics become his main source of strength. He states that his excellence in tennis had more to do with the township where he learned and trained and “with a weird proclivity for intuitive math than it did with athletic talent”. He becomes so good a tennis player that “at fourteen I was ranked seventeenth in the United States Tennis Association's Western Section”.
The novel A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again shows Wallace as a simplistic man who in spite of achieving greatness in his writing career, he preferred a life in which there are no excesses. He describes the events of his one-week trip aboard to the Caribbean aboard a cruise ship named MV Zenith. In his essay, he refers to the ship as Nadir. It is surprising that he could be uncomfortable with the professional hospitality that he received during his trip. Indeed, many people enjoy the “fun” that comes with cruising and all that goes with high-class hospitality but Wallace was in the least entertained. He laments that the trip converted him into a spoilt brat and left him in greater despair as he longed for internal satisfaction which was not forthcoming or rather did not come from the cruise as he had hoped.
Wallace is thoroughly witty. In the first paragraph of his essay A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again as he is travelling for his dad’s alma mater, his mind shifts to mathematics and how he had grown up with the mathematical concepts. He states that he had grown up “inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines”. He claims that mathematics evokes homesickness for Midwesterners and then goes ahead to give a long list of some of the lessons in mathematics that characterized his life. It is funny and witty how he sees nature and geography through the eyes of mathematics. The description that “maths at a hilly eastern school was like waking upcalculus was, quite literally, child’s play” presents Wallace as highly witty. Going by this strong evidence of Wallace’s wit in the first paragraph of a lengthy essay, it is safe to conclude that wit made up a significant part of his persona.
Wallace bring a persona that shows contentment with the self and determination to take advantage if inherent strengths. Rather than focus on his physical shortcomings of being a small fellow who ordinarily finds it hard to play tennis, Wallace gave much emphasis to hi mathematics knowledge to help him do well in tennis. He says that “My flirtation with tennis excellence had way to do with intuitive math than it did with athletic talent”. Everyone interacting with him acknowledged that he was a “pretty untalented tennis player”. However, he noted that he had good hand-eye coordination but his size and build were limitation. Wallace knew his limitations “and the limitations of what I stood inside”. He became his best in bad conditions and this goes ahead to present him as a highly optimistic person. He refused to undermine himself by comparing himself to others. Instead he chose to go by the belief that it is because we are different that each of us is special.
There is plenty of humor in the narrator’s persona. He makes fun of how he had become good at using “stats, surface, sun, gusts” that he was regarded as a physical savant. He humorously refers to himself as a “medicine boy of wind and heat” . He then describes about Antitoi, his play partner stating that Antitoi “was a slugger. I was a slug” . The narrator admits that when Antitoi was having a good day he would varnish the court with him but when he was not at his best he would lose terribly stating that “of eleven finals we played in 1974, I won two”. It is also humorous for the narrator to personify the wind and claim that “the wind had a personality, a poor temper and apparently agendas”. In yet another instance he jokes that “most people in Philo didn’t comb their hair” because apparently, the wind would mess it up. This part of his persona depicts him as a person who in spite of his “bookish” and academic preferences for maths and physics was also fun to be with and he could fit in many social settings. He comes forth as one who would not lack a nice and funny thing to say and cheer someone up.
The narrator’s persona depicts a bold and daring person from a very young age. First he acknowledges that for him to overcome his limitations in playing tennis, he was at the very best in bad conditions. He was bold enough to apply mathematics and physics to play in harsh winds and with his small body. He “developed a sort of hubris about (his) taoistic ability to control via noncontrol” . He established a private religion of the wind and this shows that there were no other players of coaches who would understand what he was doing. His boldness was rewarded as he states that “by thirteen I'd found a way not just to accommodate but to employ the heavy summer winds in matches”. It seems therefore that the narrator was charting his own course and applying playing tactics and principles that that never been tried or tested before.
The narrator’s persona showed plenty of imagination. He states that he was an unpopular player and those who found his as such had reasons and he knew the reasons well. He however states boldly that “to say that I did not use verve or imagination was untrue”. He wanted his opponents to accept that using the wind to his advantage was pretty imaginative. He pits it rather humorously that that he liked the wind or felt that it had a right to be there. The fact that he figured out how he could use the wind to help him hit balls at certain angles, and with certain force while letting the wind accelerate the ball, and twist it to score points is just pure imagination. He may have been good in physics and mathematics but each moment he used the wind to score points was mostly different from the previous and he had to figure it in his mod how best to take advantage of the prevailing winds.
Works cited
Boswell, Marshall. Understanding David Foster Wallace. University of South Carolina Press, 2003.
Max, DT. Why David Foster Wallace should not be worshipped as a secular saint . 9 October 2015. 9 June 2016 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/09/david-foster-wallace-worshipped-secular-saint>.
Miller, Michael Franklin. Consider David Foster Wallace, Or Reconsidering DFW: Literary Self-fashioning and Slacker Genius. University of Louisville, 2003.
Wallace, David Foster. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. 1997. 9 June 2016 <https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/w/wallace-fun.html>.
