The Examiner “Turns a page”: Form and Content in §25 of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King

David Foster Wallace once emphasized that “fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.” This conviction becomes most palpable in §25, one of the “more opaque sections” of Wallace’s The Pale King. In both form and content, the paragraph reveals a masterly condensation of the human in a dehumanized bureaucracy. While the phrase “X turns a page” is repeated about 100 times, representing the power of monotony and alienation, the reader also finds variation, rhythmic disruption and flashes of poetic insight that reveal the unassailability of human creativity and thus of human life. In addition, by experiencing formal elements that echo the narrative’s meaning, the reader is almost put into the protagonists’ position: she is obliged perplexedly to “turn pages” and work through a mass of seemingly incomprehensible linguistic data to look for the relevant information buried in there. “Sometimes what’s important is dull. Sometimes it’s work,” Wallace tells us elsewhere - his §25 not only narrates, it also demonstrates this insight.