David Foster Wallace Dead at 46

It is the curious quality of an unexpected death that you look for a while at the spot where the person's life stood, in hopes that there will be a sequel, as though death were only one in a long series of plot developments. So it is when DFW killed himself Friday. A long list of commenters have expressed dismay, rather than disbelief, at this sudden turn of events. He was, as we should probably have discerned from his writing, and as he himself would have put it, a Depressed Person. He was also, in his writing at least, a joyful person, delighting in long, exuberant sentences that banked and swerved like jazz solos (with footnotes and hyperlinks).

Kenyon College commencement address 2005

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