ABSTRACT
In Chapter 3 I challenge the truism in Wallace studies that all of Wallace’s therapist characters are anti-psychiatric caricatures. By broadening our understanding of Wallace’s influences to include a number of new writers, including Vladimir Nabokov, A. M. Homes, J. G. Ballard, Ken Kesey, and, most importantly, Sylvia Plath, we see that Wallace’s therapists and his treatment of illness are not as narrow as critics have assumed. There is a central metaphor of the glass jar or wall that runs through Wallace’s therapy scenes, which Wallace uses to articulate concerns about entrapment, subjectivity, and medical materialism. This glass metaphor is complemented by a fire metaphor that Wallace uses—throughout Infinite Jest in particular—to describe pain. The way these two metaphors work together shows us how Wallace treats illness in his writing, how he treats his therapists, and why the soul has an important role in his otherwise material universe.
