Not P but DFW: a plot thing

[Michael Bailey]

Not a literary plot, but a paranoid thing: she doesn’t exactly think her
feelings jibe with the therapist’s suggestion that she feels like there’s a
plot against her,  would be my guess.

>From this short segment, it seems like she’s having a feeling I can relate
to, that events are moving around her and she’s playing a part in them
absent any of her own volition.

Sort of like being a taxpayer in a country with a huge lumbering military,
although I’m guessing her concerns are more personal.

Almost inclines me to borrow a copy of the book to see if she’s more
relatable than the Incandenzas et al in IJ…


On Thu, Sep 12, 2024 at 10:03 PM Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
wrote:

> The following excerpt is from David Foster Wallace’s *The Broom of the
> System*, Chapter 5, Section a:
>
> Was this a religious thing? A deterministic crisis? I had had a friend . .
> .
> No. Determinism would be fine if she were able to feel that what determined
> her was something objective, impersonal, that she were just a tiny part of
> a large mechanism. If she didn’t feel as though she were being used.
> Used.
> Yes. As if what she did and said and perceived and thought were having some
> sort of . . . function beyond herself.
> Function. Alarm bells. Dr. Jay, after all. *A plot thing*?
> No, not *a plot thing*, definitely not *a plot thing*, she wasn’t making
> herself understood.
>
> What does "plot" mean here?
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