In this section, Roth also mocks a certain didactic tick that has preoccupied much of his later work, the notion of self as performance, the artifice of identity. The script of his life has taken precedence over his psychic reality. In fact, the first act of this tragedy reads almost like a travesty of Roth's own oeuvre: of course Axler's wife flees to California and of course Axler is too cowardly to follow her departure with suicide, 'the gun as sequel to the wife.' Axler commits himself to the hospital fully acknowledging that he never intended to go through with suicide. The impulse was spent.' What ensues is a series of plot points that should be familiar to readers of Roth, a failed psychoanalytic cure, a divorce, a trip to a mental institution. The opening lines of the book read: 'He'd lost his magic. What ultimately emerges is a nuanced exploration of truth and an affirmation of fiction as a way to recover the essential human amid a culture devoted increasingly to automation and data.Like Gregor Samsa, we meet Simon Axler at the start of his transformation - rather than waking up a giant insect, Axler has ceased to be a good actor. This process of evaluation mimics both the information processing performed by the IRS computers as well as the novel’s sustained dramatization of information overload and relevant versus irrelevant data.

performance,” the David Wallace narrative asks its readers to weigh the value of fictional truth over that of supposed non-fiction. By complicating the distinction between the fictional and the real, and by presenting itself essentially as a “nonfiction memoir,” with all that genre’s attendant blurring of the line between “the personal and public, or rather between private vs.

At the same time, the “Author Here” sections raise those questions within the larger rubric of The Pale King’s focus on bureaucracy, civic duty, and the Internal Revenue Service’s painful transition from, in Wallace’s words, a bastion of “social justice and civic virtue” to something closer to a “for profit business” run by machines. This essay examines the fictionalized “autobiograph” sections of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, each one of which begins with the phrase, “Author Here.” These sections raise many of the standard questions about the instability of truth and reality generally associated with metafictional self-reflexive writing.

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