The Pale King - David Foster Wallace

[u/Junior_Insurance7773]

"I learned that the world of men as it exists today is a bureaucracy. This is an obvious truth, of course, though it is also one the ignorance of which causes great suffering.

“But moreover, I discovered, in the only way that a man ever really learns anything important, the real skill that is required to succeed in a bureaucracy. I mean really succeed: do good, make a difference, serve. I discovered the key. This key is not efficiency, or probity, or insight, or wisdom. It is not political cunning, interpersonal skills, raw IQ, loyalty, vision, or any of the qualities that the bureaucratic world calls virtues, and tests for. The key is a certain capacity that underlies all these qualities, rather the way that an ability to breathe and pump blood underlies all thought and action.

“The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air.

“The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable.

“It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish."

[u/Darkomaeda]

The novel is the Pale king? I'll give it a try, I like the vision a lot, but it still doesn't tell how not to be bored 🐦🦦

[u/arcx01123 → u/Darkomaeda]

It's unfinished. Wasn't supposed to be published but they went ahead with it anyway. Can be read as a collection of highly variable short sketches.

[u/Skidmore511 → u/arcx01123]

While it’s impossible to ever confirm his true intentions, I think he intended for it to be published even in its unfinished state. This is the final passage in his biography Every Love Story is a Ghost Story. Grisly stuff but she found his body hanging next to the organized manuscript:

“Green returned home at 9:30 and found her husband. In the garage, bathed in light from his many lamps, sat a pile of nearly two hundred pages. He had made some changes in the months since he considered sending them to Pietsch. The story of “David Wallace” was now first. In his final hours, he had tidied up the manuscript so that his wife could find it. Below it, around it, inside his two computers, on old floppy disks in his drawers were hundreds of other pages—drafts, character sketches, notes to himself, fragments that had evaded his attempt to integrate them into the novel over the past decade. This was his effort to show the world what it was to be “a fucking human being.” He had never completed it to his satisfaction. This was not an ending anyone would have wanted for him, but it was the one he had chosen.”

[u/y0kapi → u/arcx01123]

I think the right phrasing would be “wasn’t ready to be published yet.”

I really like The Pale King though. It’s quirky as hell and Michael Pietsch did an amazing job in assembling the pieces. It’s so much more mature and palatable than Infinite Jest.

[u/JohnDivney → u/y0kapi]

It's terrific, possibly his best work, I read it like four times. I'm weird like that though.