Lost in a Bureaucratic World A Thematic Study of Boredom in David Foster Wallace's The Pale King

Abstract

Abstract: In David Foster Wallace's novel The Pale King, two themes appear connected to each other. The first is that of boredom. This theme includes the characters' feelings of boredom at work, the nature of the boring work they do, and the manifestation of boredom within the reader as he or she reads through page after page of repetitive and confusing stuff. The second theme is bureaucracy. The characters of the novel work at the Internal Revenue Service: a major bureaucratic institution in America. Their work involves auditing forms and tax returns, trying to spot mistakes therein, which is a repetitive and dull task to perform. The theme of boredom is expressed through the use of bureaucratic methods and this essay aims to illuminate this connection, and offer an explanation of why these two themes can be linked as closely as they are in the novel. The connection between these two themes is underdeveloped critically, and furthermore, often presented as separate themes. Boredom and bureaucracy together can be further expanded upon in the field of criticism. In this essay, the theoretical framework is used to establish the intricate and strong connection that bureaucracy has to boredom, to the point where it can be said one depends on the other. However, it is important to elucidate the historical changes the concept of boredom has gone through, in order to find the common denominator it shares with the concept of bureaucracy as it is represented in The Pale King. The analysis focuses on thematic expressions of boredom and the character's experiences of boredom. The second part focuses on stylistic expressions and how the book itself manages to create boredom and be boring to its readers. The essay concludes with gathering the previous analyses' connections to bureaucracy and presents the aspect of bureaucracy which is ever present in the different expressions of boredom in the text. The final section will also demonstrate how the text itself overtly states this connection between boredom and bureaucracy, and ultimately aims to have shown precisely how and why the bureaucracy is entwined with contemporary boredom.