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Chapter 71
Explanation and Analysis—Incest:
Incest and sexual abuse are a motif in the novel. While the accounts of this kind of abuse are harrowing if they are true, they are also entangled with the novel's use of unreliable narration. For example, in Chapter 71, Molly relates secondhand the story of the night Joelle's family secrets came to light:
The low-pH Daddy’s enormous stress had apparently erupted, right there at the table, with his grown daughter’s white meat between his tines, in the confession that he’d been secretly, silently in love with Madame Psychosis from way, way back; that the love had been the real thing, pure, unspoken, genuflectory, timeless, impossible; that he never touched her, wouldn’t, nor ogle, less out of a horror of being the sort of mid-South father who touched and ogled than out of the purity of his doomed love for the little girl he’d escorted to the movies as proudly as any beau, daily...
Related Themes:
Chapter 74
Explanation and Analysis—Into the Annulation-Zone:
Because Wallace uses very close third person narration that gets inside the thoughts of the characters, it becomes increasingly clear throughout the novel that there is no truly reliable narrator. The unreliable narration often creates dramatic irony, such as in Chapter 74, when Joelle tells Steeply about where the Entertainment's Master cartridge might be:
Unlock with LitCharts A+‘I used to go around saying the veil was to disguise lethal perfection...So Jim took a failed piece and told me it was too perfect to release—it’d paralyze people. It was entirely clear that it was an ironic joke. To me.’
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‘If it got made and nobody’s seen it, the Master, it’s in there with him. Buried...I bet you.’
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‘ That’s the part of the joke he didn’t know. Where he’s buried is itself buried, now. It’s in your annulation-zone. It’s not even your territory. And now if you want the thing—he’d enjoy the joke very much, I think...’
Related Themes:
