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Allegory
Definition of Allusion
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to other literary works, famous individuals, historical events, or philosophical ideas... read full definition
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to other literary works, famous individuals... read full definition
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to... read full definition
Chapter 27
Explanation and Analysis—Nixon Video-Faces:
In Chapter 27, Wallace describes the rise and fall of video calling in his imagined near-future. He uses an allusion that helps connect the comedic failure of "videophony" to his larger satire of a vanity-obsessed culture:
[A]lmost 60% of respondents who received visual access to their own faces during videophonic calls specifically used the terms untrustworthy, unlikable, or hard to like in describing their own visage’s appearance, with a phenomenally ominous 71% of senior-citizen respondents specifically comparing their video-faces to that of Richard Nixon during the Nixon-Kennedy debates of B.S. 1960.
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Chapter 29
Explanation and Analysis—Mold and Counterculture:
In Chapter 29, the narrator explains the origin of DMZ (a.k.a. Madame Psychosis), an extraordinarily hard-to-find drug that Pemulis acquires to share with Hal later in the term. The explanation includes several allusions and creates a sense of dramatic irony that is never quite resolved in the novel:
Unlock with LitCharts A+The incredibly potent DMZ is synthesized from a derivative of fitviavi, an obscure mold that grows only on other molds, by the same ambivalently lucky chemist at Sandoz Pharm. who’d first stumbled on LSD, as a relatively ephebic and clueless organic chemist, while futzing around with ergotic fungi on rye. DMZ’s discovery was the tail-end of the B.S. 1960s, just about the same time Dr. Alan Watts was considering T. Leary’s invitation to become ‘Writer in Resonance’ at Leary’s utopian LSD-25 colony in Millbrook NY on what is now Canadian soil.
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Chapter 33
Explanation and Analysis—Brands and Logos:
Allusions to real brands and logos are a motif in the novel, contributing to the novel's satirical representation of corporate power. A moment in Chapter 33 demonstrates just how saturated the novel's world is with advertising:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Pemulis, w/ aid of 150 mg. of time-release Tenuate Dospan, almost danced a little post-transaction jig on his way up the steps of the otiose Cambridge bus, feeling the way W. Penn in his Quaker Oats hat in like the 16th century must have felt trading a few trinkets to babe-in-the-woods Natives for New Jersey, he imagines, doffing the nautical cap to two nuns in the aisle.
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Chapter 36
Explanation and Analysis—Karen Carpenter:
In Chapter 36, Joelle almost dies of an overdose in Molly Notkin's bathroom. The music playing in the bathroom is an allusion that highlights the situational irony of Joelle's drug problem:
Unlock with LitCharts A+[S]he can’t stand it and reaches out for the cold tub’s rim’s cold edge to pull herself up as the white-party-noise reaches, for her, the sort of stereophonic precipice of volume to teeter on just before the speakers blow, people barely twitching and conversations strettoing against a ghastly old pre-Carter thing saying ‘We’ve Only Just Begun,’ Joelle’s limbs have been removed to a distance where their acknowledgment of her commands seems like magic...
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Chapter 42
Explanation and Analysis—Eschaton:
In Chapter 42, an allusion to a 17th-century Christian allegory helps emphasize that the game of Eschaton is a parody of Christian doctrine about the end of the world:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Eschaton takes eight to twelve people to play, w/ 400 tennis balls so dead and bald they can’t even be used for service drills anymore...The vademecumish rulebook that Pemulis in Y.P.W. got Hal Incandenza to write...is about as long and interesting as J. Bunyan’s stupefying Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come, and a pretty tough nut to compress into anything lively (although every year a dozen more E.T.A. kids memorize the thing at such a fanatical depth that they sometimes report reciting mumbled passages under light dental or cosmetic anesthesia, years later).
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Chapter 45
Explanation and Analysis—Environmental Blight:
Environmental blight is a motif in the novel. In Chapter 45, Mario's Interdependence Day film uses allusive newspaper clippings (both real and made up) to draw special attention to the relationship between O.N.A.N. politics and the decline of the environment:
Unlock with LitCharts A+ANOTHER LOVE CANAL?—24-point Superheader; TOXIC HORROR ACCIDENTALLY UNCOVERED IN UPSTATE NEW HAMPSHIRE—16-point Header-sized Subheader;
‘New Hampshire environmental officials yesterday flatly denied that vast collections of drums leaking industrial solvents, chlorides, benzenes and oxins had been quote “stumbled on” by 18 federal EPA staffers playing a casual game of softball east of Berlin, NH, claiming instead that the corroded receptacles had been placed there against statute by large men with white body suits and short haircuts in long shiny trailer trucks with O.N.A.N.’s official crest, a sombreroed eagle with a maple leaf in its mouth, stencilled on the sides...
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