"It's cost me every sexual relationship I ever had. I don't know why I do it. I'm not a political person, I don't consider myself. I'm not one of these America First, read the newspaper, will Buchanan get the nod people.... I freaked out about it one time and called a radio show about it, a doctor on the radio, anonymously, and he diagnosed it as 'the uncontrolled yelling of involuntary words or phrases, frequently insulting or scatalogical, which is coprolalia is the official term. Except when I start to come and always start yelling it it's not insulting, it's not obscene, it's always the same thing, and it's always so weird but I don't think insulting...."
Q.
"'Victory for the Forces of Democratic Freedom!" Only way louder. As in really shouting it.
This quote is a man explaining that he can't have sex without yelling a gratuitous, overtly political sentence that he doesn't even believe or support. This is a humorous way to show how sometimes the issues that stop us from experiencing intimacy are often involuntary and complex, often baffling even to the offender.
"The soft plopping sounds. The slight gassy sounds. The little involuntary grunts. The special sigh of an older man at a urinal, the way he establishes himself there and sets his feet and aims and then lets out a timeless sigh you know he's not aware of.
"This was his environment. Six days a week he stood there. Saturdays a double shift. The needles-and-nails quality of urine into water. The unseen rustle of newspapers on bare laps. The odors."
This graphic depiction of a men's bathroom belongs to the memory of a hideous man who is dealing with this paternal hatred. The person in question is his dad whose job was to stand in a bathroom and pass out mints and towels to the men who barely even noticed him. The story is about the son trying to explain how difficult it was to respect his father, even though he desparately wants to respect him and see the pride it must have taken to do such a menial job. Artistically, it's an interesting exploration of the difficult relationship men have to their fathers, because the sacrifices it takes to raise a kid often diminish the image of the father in the mind of the son who was the benefactor of the sacrificial lifestyle.
In a roundabout way, this is about destiny. Does the father not believe he has a destiny? What then is the son supposed to believe about the meaning of his life? Is life just watching people walk in and out of bathrooms and listening to their bathroom habits? The story ends with a hateful line against the father.
"Forever below is rough deck, snacks thin metal music, down where you once used to be; the line is solid and has no reverse gear; and the water, of course, is only soft when you're inside it. Look down. Now it moves in the sun, full of hard coins of light that shimmer red as they stretch away into a mist that is your own sweet salt. The coins crack into new moons, long shards of light from the hearts of sad stars. The square tank is a cold blue sheet. Cold is just a kind of hard. A kind of blind. You have been taken off guard. Happy Birthday. Did you think it over. Yes and no. Hey kid."
This poetic description of 'you' looking into a pool of water contains multiple images that could be analyzed to the nth degree. The most bare, basic explanation might be this: A kid looking into the pool doesn't see the depth of the pool, nor does he feel the softness of its water. All he can see is the dancing light on the waters surface, a cold, hard surface he has to choose to join in on.
But the piece is strategically ambiguous on what it is that the water represents. It might be adulthood. It might be death. It might be the tedium of day-to-day life. Behind the boy is a man saying "Hey kid" because the kid has been standing there for a long time. It's an existential depiction of what theorists call a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story. But its spare, elemental nature make the piece sad and distant.
"So which is the lie? Hard or soft? Silence or time?
The lie is that it's one or the other. A still, floating bee is moving faster than it can think. From overhead, the sweetness drives it crazy."
This image is a wonderful depiction of apathy. The bee doesn't get to experience the joy of having what it wants. It only gets to experience the exasperating desire that drives it to fly faster than it can think. Mentioning the thought aspect of it is an interesting way to bring in the question of thought in terms of stopping desire. Because it's happening faster than thought, it's primal and undefeatable, but the same desire that drive the bee crazy is also keeping it in flight.
This is a powerful depiction of mental unhealth, especially depression. Wallace shows that the boy above the crowd is like the bee above the can of coke. He likes the height, but he hates the desire for experience. His thoughts keep him from experiencing life directly like all the people below.
"The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror."
This is the first line of this story. It perfectly articulates the inarticulatability of depression. In that irony alone, the story seems to condemn the person in question. The bare meaning of the quote alone is sad, that the effect of depression is a loneliness borne from the inability it creates in connecting emotionally with people who won't understand what it's like to be depressed. But in its circuitous logic, it turns the question on its head, literally begging the question. It's not necessarily that suffering is unique. It's that there is a kind of pride that keeps a suffering person from allowing others to empathize.
This is tricky stuff, and Wallace treats it in way more detail in the story, but none of this is to discredit mental health issues, and Wallace especially would never want his stories to make someone feel more alone and more despairing.
