The essay is structured around close readings of individual sentences from Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion and The Pale King. What kind of syntactic arrangement produces the distinctive feel of a Wallace sentence, and how does sentence structure relate to Wallace’s wider themes, the larger narrative structures of his fiction, and the construction of his fictional worlds? The length and complexity of Wallace’s sentences has often been remarked on, and sometimes satirised, but this essay breaks new ground by looking in detail at the syntactic structure of Wallace’s sentences to understand the work done by that structure in the creation both of character and of ontologically complex fictional worlds.
