Beware Of False Idols: David Foster Wallace Was A Prophet Of Postmodern Despair
(ANALYSIS) Seventeen years after David Foster Wallace's death, literary critics still fumble around his genius like blind men describing an elephant. They obsess over his footnotes and verbal pyrotechnics. They catalog his postmodern innovations. They completely miss what matters.
Wallace wasn't performing intellectual gymnastics. He was diagnosing America's spiritual collapse.
The author of “Infinite Jest” grasped something that makes secular intellectuals squirm: People must worship something. Take away God and they don't become enlightened — they become slaves to smaller gods. Wallace witnessed this transformation with surgical clarity. His characters bow before drugs, screens, achievement, self-help mantras — anything promising relief from the weight of existence.
READ: How Leo Tolstoy Grappled With Both God And The Fear Of Meaning
This wasn't theoretical for Wallace. He had lived every form of modern idolatry. His Kenyon College commencement speech sounds less like career advice than a recovering addict's warning. Chase money and poverty becomes permanent. Worship appearance and ugliness haunts every mirror. Bow to intellect and stupidity becomes your secret fear.
Wallace also knew these truths personally. The same brilliance that elevated him trapped him in spirals of self-examination. He could dissect his neuroses with microscopic precision, but couldn't escape them. Intelligence became another false savior — promising freedom while delivering more refined forms of captivity.
His fiction reads like field reports from America's spiritual battlefield. The aforementioned “Infinite Jest” doesn't mock entertainment culture. Rather, it exposes entertainment as religion. The novel's deadly video represents where pleasure-worship leads: People literally dying from consuming what they crave most.
The tennis academy and rehab facility anchoring the story aren't arbitrary choices. They’re two sides of the same wound: Obsessive striving and numb avoidance. One chases control, the other chases oblivion. Both end in the same place — a compulsion as a shield against the void.
Wallace's characters chase transcendence through increasingly frantic methods. They join movements, pursue physical extremes, lose themselves in academic rabbit holes and seek salvation through romantic merger. Anything except facing the question that haunted Wallace: What makes human existence meaningful when the universe offers no clear answer?
His tentative response sounds almost embarrassingly simple — genuine attention to others. Wallace suspected that real empathy might be secular humanity's closest approach to grace. But sustaining that attention required constant battle against the self-obsession he saw as humanity's factory setting.
This tension helps explain why his work feels simultaneously hopeful and hopeless. Wallace glimpsed redemption in moments of authentic human connection, but he also recognized how rare those moments remain. The consciousness enabling empathy also generates the self-awareness making empathy nearly impossible.
His suicide makes terrible sense through this lens. Wallace spent his career mapping spiritual emptiness with scientific precision. But mapping isn't healing. He could identify modern secular life's pathologies better than anyone, yet couldn't cure them in himself. The analytical tools making him a great writer became instruments of self-destruction.
Modern readers often mistake Wallace for an irony prophet, missing his core message entirely. He wasn't celebrating postmodern cleverness. He was issuing urgent warnings against it. The ironic detachment feeling so sophisticated actually prevents the sincere engagement making life endurable. Wallace understood irony as spiritual acid disguised as intellectual refinement.
Wallace’s prescience feels unsettling now. Social media obsession, tribal polarization and the death of shared meaning — he anticipated it all. He recognized that digital connection would deepen rather than bridge human isolation. He predicted that infinite information access would breed confusion, not clarity. Most crucially, he saw through secular culture's fundamental lie: That reason alone satisfies human needs for meaning. Logic can't fill the hole that humans feel in their center. Without transcendent purpose, people inevitably fashion gods from available materials—usually their own appetites and anxieties.
This insight transformed Wallace's fiction from mere social commentary into prophecy. He wasn't just describing contemporary American experience, but revealing its hidden religious structure. The malls, courts and clinics populating his stories function as secular shrines where people perform worship rituals without admitting their spiritual nature.
Wallace grasped that the real choice isn't between faith and reason. It's between conscious devotion and unconscious worship of false gods. He chose awareness over comfort and truth over peace. The price was his life, but the legacy helps others recognize what they're actually serving.
John Mac Ghlionn is a researcher and essayist. He covers psychology and social relations. His writing has appeared in places such as UnHerd, The US Sun and The Spectator World.