Check out Joe Winkler's post over at Joe Talks about DFW's, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, from Oblivion: Stories:
One of the stranger, perplexing, yet still highly enjoyable stories by David Foster Wallace is his story, “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” from the collection Oblivion. In it, a dutiful son takes care of his mother, driving with her back and forth to her lawyer’s office on the bus. The mother, reaping rewards from a liability suit, elected to get cosmetic surgery which went terribly wrong, twice. She now walks around with a constant face of terrific panic and fear, which understandably, scares those around her. Her son, the narrator of the story, was involved in his own lawsuit with a 9-year old boy who fell through the roof of his space in which he keeps many deadly species of spiders. The boy fell and was killed. Past that, there’s not much narrative in the story. Rather, like much of the rest of Oblivion, it is a story of telling of a story. In the immediate presence of the story, the son and the mother are on the bus, and that’s all that really happens...< Prev | Next > |
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