Examples Of Emotion In David Foster Wallace's The Pale King

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On: Emotion in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King The way David Foster Wallace describes emotion in this brilliant book is incredible. Understanding why people feel the way they do can be irritating and heavy on one’s mind, or at least it was heavy on my mind. After reading The Pale King, the definition of “boredom” is finally clear to me. I am writing an annotation on emotion because David Foster Wallace presented a stunning amount of examples on how his characters feel and behave throughout the book. Before I started reading this novel, I read about the author, David Foster Wallace. As I have mentioned in class, I was in great shock to find out that David Foster Wallace had committed suicide at the age of 46. I believe that he was writing this book based on his own emotions. Wallace wrote several examples about his characters wanting to commit suicide. For example, Sylvanshine, who had psychic abilities, talked about the training officer, Pat, that carried a loaded gun and planned to shoot herself, and also in the scene where Lane is experiencing thoughts of suicide due to his boredom. I…show more content…
Wallace is absolutely correct; if we enjoyed doing stupid boring stuff that is productive, we could literally accomplish anything in life. I like this quote because it relates to me a lot. When I overcome my tantrums of not wanting to do boring homework, life becomes so much easier. It is amazing how much more we can do and accomplish when things are not boring. But when it comes to boredom, we start to think too much and space off somewhere, which makes it so hard to concentrate and pay attention. Boredom is a difficult thing to deal with. The things that people can do when they are bored are outrageous. For example, Wallace described a man whose marriage was boring and unfulfilling. Because it was boring, the man went through a cycle of several affairs and

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