Good Old Neon by David Foster Wallace (Story Review + Discussion)

I've been thinking about this story, "Good Old Neon" by David Foster Wallace from Oblivion: Stories, for the last few days. Since it was around 40 pages, I picked it up before bed to complete from a reading list of favorites I was working off of. The list is more for me than the other person now, a way of indirectly ironing out my thoughts. I am always bouncing my reality off of the contours of fiction.

Boy.

First of all, you should know that the story centers around a narrator discussing the events that lead to his suicide. Feel free to stop reading my discussion of the story if that will upset you; there's no shame in that, and it doesn't mean you can't handle complex emotions or ideas. Sometimes, we just aren't in the right headspace to handle a specific way of viewing the world—which Good Old Neon fleshes out.

About the Story & Collection

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Novel: Oblivion: Stories by David Foster Wallace
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Release Date: August 30, 2005

In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness -- a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his.

These are worlds undreamt of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown ("The Soul Is Not a Smithy"). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity by delineating the office politics surrounding a magazine profile of an artist who produces miniature sculptures in an anatomically inconceivable way ("The Suffering Channel"). Or capture the ache of love's breakdown in the painfully polite apologies of a man who believes his wife is hallucinating the sound of his snoring ("Oblivion").

Each of these stories is a complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once preposterously surreal and painfully immediate.

The story centers around a 29-year-old narrator, Neal, explaining the reasoning and therapy that led to his suicide. Essentially, he is convinced that no matter what he does, he is being manipulative. Even in analyzing his reasons for doing something—his morality, compass, etc,.—he knows that he is secretly directing the listener towards what he wants. They react in the way he expects. And that's because it's literally impossible to prove him wrong. You cannot get someone to believe something who doesn't believe in the ability of belief itself. Circular, I know.

“My whole life, I've been a fraud. I'm not exaggerating. Pretty much all I've ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. It's a little more complicated than that, maybe. But when you come right down to it, it's to be liked, loved. Admired, approved of, applauded, whatever. You get the idea.”

The beauty and terror of Good Old Neon for me was that for the first time in my life really, I fully understood the reasoning and logic behind the narrator making the decision to end his life. Of course, you can never identify what factors cause someone to be in such pain or disillusionment that they go through with that choice. It wasn't that Neal, the 29-year-old in question, was wracked by grief or disorientation. It was more so that he had a framework of reality he couldn't quite shake, no matter his various attempts to dislodge it. He understood the why behind his perspective, but couldn't shift into changing it whatsoever. He believes that at the end of the day, he is a false person.

I think Good Old Neon was helpful in this way, in addressing a common misconception: that we can eventually talk someone out of the way they feel, so long as we understand it. The reality is much more complicated, deserving nuance and sensitivity.

And then, of course, Neal isn't entirely innocent either. He can't separate himself from the competition aspects of his identity (which mimics some of the reading recently I've done about mimetic desire.) To his credit, Neal knows that he's not fully seeing or listening to others, and of course, that might help his world expand more—to not feel so trapped. But it's easier said than done. It does remind me about how bad we are at actually listening to others, and a formative read on that topic (and for many other WLS readers.)

(And I absolutely recall this when I was wildly depressed in spring of 2019; I felt like such a selfish, awful person because I couldn't get past my own misery enough to fully see and absorb and care about others in the way that I normally would, and was uncomfortably aware of how that limited me and my happiness. So I don't think it's inherently a flaw, just a circumstance of this narrowing instinct for survival.

“She was much more than that...but I never really let her be or saw her as more, although I put up a good front as somebody who could have deep conversations and really wanted to know and understand who she was inside.”

Deep down, he is unhappy with this lack of authenticity within himself, but doesn't know how to escape it. And similarly, I think we in society are very quick to call everyone we don't like—or who hurts us—a narcissist. Sure, some of them probably are (and that's a specific criteria diagnosed by medical experts), but that also doesn't mean they're bad, either. Even if you believe David Foster Wallace is writing solely about narcissistic personality disorder, the point is that his supposed narcissism is causing him to suffer rather than making him blind to suffering. Which, optimistically or ideally, should be enough to spark compassion from others. You cannot get someone to care about anything beyond themselves, but you can give them all the support you can and hope that one day, they might heal enough to expand some.

Similarly, you can't treat it transactionally though. You can't go into a relationship of giving expecting for them to someday be able to give back to you. The whole point is that it's unconditional, but that's part of why this story—and the hopelessness within it—hurt me so much to read. Because I believe that you can and should love and care for others (whomever they may be to you) regardless of whether or not they "deserve" it.

Related: one of my favorite friends is one who I will forever feel guilty around, because she was so endlessly kind to me when I needed it in a way I can never repay (although I of course would, if given the chance; I hope she is never in a similar boat.) And I understand the guilt and shame of avoiding someone like that too—feeling unbalanced or like you owe something, in exchange. But, we can never be fully even with everyone in our lives, and receiving grace is also a skill worth cultivating (IMO.)

“Love is never wasted, for its value does not rest on reciprocity. —C.S. Lewis”

Can You Really Do Anything Good? Can You Ever Really Know You're Happy?

In college, my boyfriend at the time said that he could always tell when I didn't actually like someone (or what they've done "to me") because I'd say they "mean well."

Oh, they mean well.

And he'd say uh, actually, they don't.

Part of me meant it in the Southern colloquialism way. A bless your heart-like turn of phrase. The other part of me believed it. Everyone's just doing the best they can. There's my value system and then there's theirs. Who am I to judge the execution?

I'd like to think we're all trying our best to be good people, whatever that means, and Good Old Neon turns that on its head by presenting a main character terrified that they're actually so manipulative and self-centered that they've just convinced everyone into their goodness rather than believing it. The word "genuine" ceases to have meaning because they're convinced that authentic emotion or belief doesn't actually exist. They don't believe in belief at all, and that's a trap from which there is no escape. (Related: Looking for Alaska by John Green. "I go to seek a Great Perhaps," labrynith of suffering, etc,. etc,.)

“'Am I happy?' is one of those questions that, if it has got to be asked, more or less dictates its own answer.”

So the key might be just to never analyze anything deeper. To not think. The only way to escape this awful self-awareness is to forget and bury it entirely.

And he does try. He goes to therapy. He joins hobbies. He "knew what [his problem] was" but couldn't seem to stop. He even admits to his careful vigilance around the therapist and his impressions.

“Nobody'd ever done anything bad to me, every problem I had ever had I'd been the cause of. I was a fraud, and the fact that I was lonely was my own fault (of course his ears pricked up at fault, which is a loaded term) because I seemed to be so totally self-centered and fraudulent that I experienced everything in terms of how it affected people's view of me and what I needed to do to create the impression of me I wanted them to have.”

Good Old Neon actually immediately reminded me of Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger, which I read and book club'd in high school with the Teen Classics Book Club at Oxford Exchange, an independent bookstore at which I used to work. I remember Franny and Zooey being a conversation topic within Dash and Lily's Book of Dares by David Levithan and Rachel Cohn (which, coincidentally, is a delightful Christmastime read I was fond of as a teenager.) So I read it when I was about seventeen, after enjoying The Catcher in the Rye.

Franny and Zooey is structured basically as a two-part conversation between Franny and Zooey, two siblings discussing whether any good you do can actually be considered selfless since it makes you feel good and better to do it.

Here, we could get into Calvinism and predestination the way I did in college in history classes. We can talk about determining the effectiveness of altruism à la The Most Good You Can Do. We can talk about the Machiavellian index and how willing we might be to manipulate other people, even if we think we're doing something "for the right reasons." We could even chat about this study (one I love and cite often), which is that we always vastly underestimate how happy we make others when we ask them for help. Humans do like to feel needed and seen, even if you might feel individually like you're being secretly terrible by trying to be "good."

On a possibly-too-personal level, over the past two or so years, I started randomly feeling like a bad person all the time. Everything made me feel rotten. I had this fixation I couldn't escape that I was secretly terrible and unkind, and had misled others. I wouldn't have classified it as OCD, or anxiety, or even anything (and sometimes I think labeling our various psychiatric patterns can do more harm than good) but it did somehow come up with a doctor at some point who picked up on my tendency and offered me a medication to try to eradicate it. Turns out that can be considered an "intrusive thought."

It's scary, the idea that a substance can change your mind significantly on something. It's scary to see the effects that one thread can have on other aspects of your life too. I didn't realize how many aspects of how I operated were related to my perceived notions of goodness vs. not, and my obsessively high moral standard for myself. (Motivation was a little harder to come by for things I normally did on autopilot, but I was also much kinder to myself and more relaxed.) I have no desire to take medication long-term and am generally skeptical or at least suspicious of psychiatric pills, but the experiment was helpful on a short-term level for showing me how significantly one belief (or lack thereof) can change you and your behavior. (There's actually a great, subtle novel on the mercurial nature of belief too that I'll review soon by a favorite author—Each Night Was Illuminated by Jodi Lynn Anderson.)

For example, Stoicism tells you to always act in alignment with your values and you will can always be content. So if your belief requires you viewing yourself as a good person (or a bad person), that'll impact throughout your actions. Mimetic desire tells us that we can choose what to want and make it literally anything. Does it even need to be natural goodness? Because you can talk yourself out of anything being genuine.

“The fraudulence paradox was that the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive or attractive to other people, the less impressive or attractive you felt inside—you were a fraud.”

Maybe the answer is complete and total delusion. That you can't think too much about it.

The final understanding of this "paradox" was satisfying to the narrator, but led to the broader problem: that he could no longer believe himself about anything. He was too self-conscious for that.

Maybe We're Thinking About Ourselves Too Much?

Rich coming from me as a gal who's been on a philosophy/self-understanding kick, but the key to combatting narcissism might just be to take ourselves more at face value and treat things (and ourselves) more shallowly. Neal admits his line of thinking is egotistical and self-centered, but that doesn't help. Again, the why doesn't help the what.

The answer of what to do re: David Foster Wallace, is whatever keeps you from going into a similar place to him. (Again, always here for someone who feels that way.) David Foster Wallace unfortunately did end up committing suicide; he hung himself on his porch after finishing a manuscript and penning a letter to his wife. Online, critics will discuss the role of narcissism in the sort of self-considerations present in Good Old Neon. Is introspection—and more specifically, analyzing your motivations—inherently narcissistic? Maybe we're considering ourselves too much. What's allowing you openness to others versus what is too zoomed in on the self? We're all a little selfish. We want to feel good, survive on an evolutionary level, be happy. Where's the line in determining what's really "real" for us or others?

On that note,the theme feels like a fundamental distrust of others and ourselves. If we can't believe in our own good, we can't trust anything at all. Surface-level? Deeper? Doesn't matter. Nothing does without that.

Infinite Associations, Limited Language

Memory and associations and all that are 4D—just constantly expanding in a thousand directions. Definitely feeling a little galaxy-brained, and his ability to put this sensation into words was beyond thrilling to me.

On the speed of ideas

Even compressing something—orienting it in space and time and language—flattens and minimizes it. So you can forgive yourself for believing that it's impossible to convey your perspective at a given time because it absolutely is.

For David Foster Wallace, that's the limitation, and I absolutely adored his ability to concisely convey this exact frustration. I'd never seen it rendered so articulately, despite my many attempts to do the same. In the sheer amount of time it takes you to communicate your thoughts to someone else, the original thread has multiplied a thousandfold, so you'll never fully be able to say everything you want to.

And then there was some gratitude, some gravity, to the finality of each of these associations that I appreciated, although I am enormously sad that David Foster Wallace and his character felt the need to make them final in order to solidify them in a way palatable to their being.

Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust

Which leads me to the last point, I guess. The reason why Good Old Neon is such a very good but very hard read: beyond understanding, all you have is blind faith. For me, that's a hopeful thought, but I completely see why that can be a bleaker perspective. It's binary.

I see this quote around a lot recently, but "the price of your new life is your old one," etc,. But teetering on that in-between is obviously terrifying.

Once you truly know yourself or another person, once you get why you do what you do and understand what you have control over and what you don't, all you can do is hope that you genuinely mean well when you think you do. To hope your definition of good aligns with someone else's and that you share some commonality. But you cannot force that on someone. It either all matters, or it all really doesn't. Of course, for David Foster Wallace, you know what his answer is.

For me, personally, I choose to believe that my intentions are honorable and that people are fundamentally good, that there is beauty to see even when you're in the trenches, and that someone will love you even when you are at your least lovable—even when and especially when you're worried you're a shitty, manipulative, dark, repetitive person. My main concern upon reading this is that you can't fully express to others to trust you. You cannot make them do it. They still have to make that jump in seeing.

I also thought a lot about hindsight bias or self-fulfilling prophecy in regards to Good Old Neon, and how profoundly the understanding of the story is influenced by its ending—by knowing that it ends in suicide.

A Few Details & Lines I Loved

• He examines the classic definition of masculinity (burying feelings, etc,.) as being a near-constant state of fear. You fear the loss of validation so highly that you "cannot feel genuine love" without the tie to conquest.
• He does admit to unconscious influences, a favorite topic of mine which has given me a lot of peace in considering similar existential crises to his. "Although we're seldom conscious of it, we are all basically instruments or expressions of our evolutionary drives, which are themselves the expressions of forces that are infinitely larger and more important than we are.)"
• He discusses the ceremonial qualities of events only upon bookmarking them in time or space—i.e. the "last" of something. Ritual and repetition is something I think about frequently.
• He's aware of his tendency to structure his life as a narrative and pull a greater meaning out of everything—which, as a writer, I relate to. What are you blowing out of proportion vs. what's "objectively" significant?
• The frustration of being just good enough to know you're not good enough at something! Relatable and annoying.

Overall—The Insights

There's no good way to summarize my thoughts on this story that isn't going to sound overly simplified or naïve, because I have been thinking about Good Old Neon a lot. Emotionally, I hurt for the people who feel this way and don't see a way out.

Mentally, I'm thinking very galaxy-brained like David Foster Wallace thinks above—like any association I can compress into the reflective language simply isn't going to get what I want to across.

Of course, I've been mulling over desire and understanding and attachment/detachment lately. I read a book on how we decide what we want. I read about Stoic philosophy, and the fluidity of identity over time (what about us remains the same person?) How we connect with others. How to balancelightness vs. significance. How much agency we have over our own lives. All that existential jazz.

There's also a lengthy conversation here about how we construct belief. I have a whole rabbit hole to go down on that one, because that's frequently my answer to the question whenever someone asks me what the hardest aspect of my book revision process has been.

That line: how do I push a character to or from belief? What do I determine is the "line" of someone believing in something when there's no sudden, cataclysmic shift? How does that happen in reality? I've thought about belief systems—and how we construct them—a whole lot.

At the end of the day, with this story and with everything else—you either believe in goodness or you don't. That there's a point or that there isn't. That you go on or you don't? Do you trust someone else? Can you ever?

You can't force someone to believe you or trust you, and you can't force yourself to believe something or trust something. There are a thousand (maybe misguided) elements that will point you to or from that line, maybe inarticulable.

So on that note, some questions for thought:

• Do you believe people are their endings?
• Do you need to understand—or be understood by someone—to love them?
• Do you feel like someone can see (and understand) the worst in you and still love you meaningfully?
• Surely spending time trying to be a better person is a better pursuit than the reverse, even if it doesn't "feel" real?
• How do you best zoom out of yourself?

Under this sort of circular logic, if no answer or "right feeling" exists, surely all that matters is just...the decision at the end? To go on or not? To look deeper or not? And the difference in decision is why David Foster Wallace is a posthumous literary discussion and we aren't. Another thought I've had lately: that there's what happens, and then there's the story you tell yourself about it, and David Foster Wallace has an impossible time bridging this divide for himself.

More on this to come, I'm sure.

Books I Thought of While Reading—Appendix

misfit / Anatomy of a Misfit by Andrea Portes

the instability of time / Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman

goodness / Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger

ritual / For Such Small Creatures Such Are We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Uncertain World by Sasha Sagan

kindness / Congratulations, by the Way by George Saunders

narcissism / The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism by Kristin Dombek

wanting & desire / Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life by Luke Burgis

memory & construction / The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory by Dr. Julia Shaw

action > thought / Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought by Barbara Tversky

good old neon