Not P but DFW: a plot thing

[Mike Jing]

Thanks for the reply. Your help is always greatly appreciated.


On Mon, Sep 16, 2024 at 1:33 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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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