Wallace on Time

If you're interested in the fiction of David Foster Wallace, you definitely ought to read this essay about his philosophical undergraduate thesis on temporal problems, logic and fatalism, in which the late author saves free will as we know it and the future. The influence of these ideas on parts of Wallace's bibliography is interesting to explore. The first and most obvious connection I make is to the ending to "Good Old Neon", maybe one of the finest moments in his short fiction. I'm not going to give the ending away, but it is working with precisely the same ideas explored in this article.

"I knew him as a philosopher with a fiction hobby," Jay Garfield, an adviser on Wallace's thesis and now a professor at Smith College, told me recently. "I didn't realize he was one of the great fiction writers of his generation with a philosophy hobby."