What was unique about Wallace was that his refusal to be conclusive in his writing, in the sense that a subject ends or a story ends and is finished with when he stops writing. As with a mind that engages life not as framework containing an easily explained and grasped beginning, middle, and end, his prose didn't build to a point to be made, an effect to be had, nor did it perform the artificial dialectic of having it's dualisms come into conflict and produce some unexpected new thing.

The fiction didn't come to any pretense of fulfilling a grand narrative; rather, these were mini narratives we traveled through, formations of the society and the habits of its characters revealed who are at once loosely connected with everything else in the area and yet so close in proximity. His writing was a record of continual process, full of unveilings, small voiced declarations, competing manifestos of how to change the way things are. Whatever DFW comes to be called years from now, he was a perhaps the first post modernist writer to understand irony as it's lived, not applied as a card trick. He was a master, and he will be missed.

couldn't possibly have said it better myself, though if possible i would have said something like this. a beautiful tribute.

Wallace's book, Infinite Jest has been on my short list of books to read (the length is pretty intimidating) for a while now.

One cannot know the details of what really was going on with him - maybe he was diagnosed with a terminal illness. I have tremendously mixed emotions about people who kill themselves without good reason - as in the case of a painful illness - because they take huge pieces of the people who loved and cared about them with them. Judy Collins once said that her son's suicide was a way to tell her: f**k you. There's a lot of truth to that. And for Wallace to set it up (if that was the case) for his wife to discover him really makes me angry.

I don't know what else to say. Reading about this yesterday really, really bummed me out. Sad.

His short story, "The Depressed Person," is the most agonizing and accurate portrayal of chronic depression I've read. Back before I got professional help, it was the only sign I had that anyone understood.

I wish he had had the same sign.

When good people like D.F.W. kill themselves, it makes me very sad. The sign of being a good person is that you have empathy and respect for others, and a perennial doubt of yourself and your own views. Unfortunate, these thoughts, when amplified, can even lead to suicide, and that makes me very sad.

Though I would have to count myself among those who find as much to criticize as to admire about Wallace's fiction (the nonfiction I consider almost flawless), the messy parts of his best work are as important as the flashes of brilliance, because they are testament to his fearlessness and ambition. Wallace consistently bemoaned the prevalence of irony in the fiction of the information age, and while his 'big book,'*Infinite Jest*, has all the trappings of the so-called 'post-modern' novel, the soul and spirit of the work is much closer to the sprawling, tragic urgency of the 1850s-era Herman Melville than the dry, jaded pessimism and aloofness so characteristic of the novelists to whom Wallace is most often compared. Wallace will always stand out for the trappings of his work--the footnotes, the futuristic, quasi-sci-fi nature of IJ's premise, the exuberant egg-headedness of his prose--but what made him great was his investment in the old stuff: pathos and comedy; 'lunacy and sorrow', as John Irving once put it in *The World According to Garp*.

I suppose it's especially hard to hear this news--despite being aware that Wallace has long struggled with depression--because I always sensed a full, generous heart behind his words: a boundless enthusiasm and, above all, a refreshing empathy and compassion for the human animal, however wretched and ridiculous he might be. His curiosity, his good-natured sense of humor, his obvious brilliance and limitless vision--all of these characteristics suggested a man who had much to live for, who had learned how to find the sublime in even the most mundane subjects and places. Again, I am reminded of Melville, who, in Hawthorne's words, could neither believe in anything nor be comfortable in his disbelief.

The reasons behind his decision may never be known (for the sake of his family and his own sense of privacy, I hope the details remain mysterious), but one can't help but feel that, if someone like Wallace could no longer find anything in this sad, tragic, lunatic world to live for, we're in more trouble than we think.

Looking up at my bookshelf, I notice that Infinite Jest is sitting right next to A Confederacy of Dunces

Oh, this news hurts. DFW was that rare thing in this late evening of the American empire - someone who dared to embrace imagination and empathy and intellect. In a country where empathy is considered weakness, and intellectual endeavor suspect, he showed so much of both in his writing, and the writing is splendidly fearless.

I remember being on a plane and reading 'Infinite Jest' and laughing so hard that the people around me got uncomfortable. I remember reading an article he wrote on Roger Federer that was maybe the best thing I've ever read about tennis. He was a generous, humanist writer and from all accounts an outstanding teacher in this age of irony and he will be deeply missed.

Discussing causality in suicide is a tricky business, both both in psychological and existential terms. Suggesting that David Foster Wallace "chose" to kill himself presumes that his choice-making faculties were intact, that he was David Foster Wallace as those who knew him had always known him. I didn't know DFW and am only glancingly familiar with his work, but for those of us who study suicide and treat people who are tormented (and sometimes, killed) by suicidal despair, it's clear that the emotional agony sufficient to lead to the suicidal impulse is also extreme enough to have, in the same process, undone that person's ordinary problem-solving and choice-making processes. The person who engages in the suicidal act is not the person we have known in other contexts. They person who dies by suicide is, in over 90% of cases studied by retrospective 'psychological autopsy', someone suffering from a particularly virulent form of mood disorder or other suicidality-engendering mental illness. It is not "Bob (or David, or Jane) choosing to kill himself", but rather, "Bob, unraveled by the agony of illness, blindly seeking relief from pain". The act, perceived from outside that agony, seems without reason, or even, as some of the other letters have suggested, intentionally malignant; from inside the seemingly endless and intolerable subjective pain and hopelessness of the suicidal individual, it is, in the moment of unendurable suffering, the only exit visible. Those left behind to mourn in the wake of a suicide often struggle greatly to come to terms with what seems to be a heartless or sadistic 'choice'. Their suffering, which can go on and on, is made just a bit lighter if our discourse can acknowledge that what looks like a 'choice' was, in fact, a person killed being by their illness. ---