"Forever Overhead"

David Foster Wallace’s “Forever Overhead” is a very intriguing piece of literature that describes the events of a young boys thirteenth birthday. His extreme descriptions make you feel like you are experience this day in his shoes. It is almost like you get to escape your reality, and become the boy in the story. You get to experience from his perspective, as he discovers new things about himself. One of the things I found interesting about his piece was the wording of the text and his use of periods to allow the reader to make frequent pauses. He would explain the boy’s thoughts, followed by a sentence that didn’t really make sense until you thought about its deeper meaning. For example, as the character is thinking about killing time he throws in the sentence, “Bees have to move very fast to stay still.” I think these sentences make the readers think about things from a new perspective and it also makes it very memorable and enjoyable.

Throughout Wallace’s work, you can see many explications of techniques we have discussed and that have been mentioned in Carr and Barthleme’s “Not Knowing.” Imagery is obviously a huge element used in “Forever Overhead.” Everything from the boy’s emotions, thoughts, and perspectives can be experienced while reading this story. Barthleme explains how the “not knowing” is crucial to art, and it is what permits art to be made. He describes problems as a type of comfort. Furthermore, he says that people can even suffer from having a “loss of problems” in which everything becomes so simple that it makes their writing immeasurable shallow and trivial. Wallace uses this technique because it is clear that his writing is pretty complex. The meaning behind the story is not always clear-cut, but instead it composed of very jumbled and messy thoughts of a teenaged boy. According to Barthleme, if you render “messy” enough to the point that you are enabled to feel it, he would have to be more graphic than the decorum that the occasion allows.  I think this is exactly what Wallace was trying to do by making the readers able to feel the “messiness” along with the character.   Barthleme also says that art is a true account of the activity of the mind. In “Forever Overhead,” the entire story is the activity of a mind, which shows Wallace uses this technique as well.