"It’s that he persists in the bizarre adolescent idea that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants is a cure for ontological despair. And so, it appears, does Mr. Updike-he makes it plain that he views the narrator’s impotence as catastrophic, as the ultimate symbol of death itself, and he clearly wants us to mourn it as much as Turnbull does. I’m not especially offended by this attitude; I mostly just don’t get it. Erect or flaccid, Ben Turnbull’s unhappiness is obvious right from the book’s first page. But it never once occurs to him that the reason he’s so unhappy is that he’s an asshole."
This quote is a perfect example of the underspoken, satirical anger that Wallace shows in this collection. Updike's novel was incredibly misogynistic and solipsistic, and Wallace lets his artistry down to just call Updike out in no unclear language.
"And to those tormented souls considering autocastration in 1998, we wish to say "Stop! Stay your hand!""
This story opens with a factoid about autocastration, explaining that many men in America find their sexual appetite so overwhelming that they autocastrate themselves. Wallace teases here by saying, "Don't! I've found something so sexually disgusting that you won't want it anymore." Then he explains that the 'alternative' is working for the Adult Video News award show and watching excessive amounts of pornography.
This is a clever way of discussing the unfortunate state of the pornography industry as a powerhouse in the country, and of addressing the sad effects it is having in the lives of Americans.
“Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I'm bullshitting myself, morally speaking?”
Wallace turns the critical lens of this collection inward to address publicly how he feels affected by the culinary controversy of the ethical treatment of lobsters. Simply put, the essay is not about lobsters; it's about how we make moral decisions.
“It's not that students don't "get" Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get -- the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke -- that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle."
Wallace is himself a famously humorous writer, as seen even in the title of this essay on humor. His core point here is that the students are interacting with humorous ideas from an academic perspective instead of understanding the truths the jokes impart in their sense of self. They don't 'get' the joke because they aren't open to being affected by the unfortunate reality of their lives.
“To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.”
Wallace is comparing candidates for political office to 'icons,' which is expressly religious imagery. This criticism is layered, then, so that Wallace is simultaneously criticizing the blind faith many Americans resort to for life's most intimate questions, as well as criticizing the iconization of politics in the minds of Americans who don't understand their religious and political views enough to keep them separate (on both sides of the fence).
