The US-American writer David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) is associated with postmodernism and a loose group of authors – the New Sincerity Movement – who departed from the stance of irony and parody common in 1990s literature. Wallace’s oeuvre comprises three novels as well as several collections of short stories and essays. Compared to the previous authors discussed here, Wallace is not one of the usual suspects referenced in the field of Medical Humanities and Narrative Medicine, even though his writing – especially Infinite Jest (1996) – deals with all kinds of human suffering, from drug and alcohol addiction to depression and suicide. The short story ‘The Depressed Person’, for example, published in Harper’s Magazine in 1998, deals with a nameless woman who is trapped in a spiral of painful, (self-) destructive thought patterns that represent the agony of her experiences with depression – or claim to do so. In an earlier story from 1984, ‘The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing’, clinical depression, too, takes centre stage as the narrator, an unnamed, twenty-one-year-old, highly eloquent Brown University student, struggles with the effects of the antidepressant he takes against the ‘Bad Thing’. While ‘The Depressed Person’ uses practically no metaphors to represent ‘the impossibility of sharing or articulating’ the pain of depression (57), ‘The Planet Trillaphon’, by contrast, is permeated with comparisons through which its first-person narrator tries to convey the experience of severe clinical depression. These comparisons for depression comprise common source domains for illness (battle, journey) and depression (dark hole, suffocation, glass jar) as well as the narrator’s attempt at a metaphor of his own. Like the writers I discussed earlier, Wallace uses these metaphors creatively by questioning, expanding and elaborating them, placing special attention on one consequence of battle, namely defeat. As demonstrated by Joan Didion’s writing on migraine, a focus on defeat is not necessarily problematic; Wallace’s approach to the often-dreaded side of the battle comparison bears out this insight. His innovation is to invite us to challenge the negative associations of defeat not only via his ingenious use of metaphor but also via narrative form.

In earlier chapters I showed how narrative analysis contributes to metaphor analysis by focusing on the narrative scenarios inherent in metaphor.