Critical Response #1

Colleen Mundy
Dr. Tony Barnstone
ENGL 302
February 24, 2009

Critical Response
David Foster Wallace’s “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” was really interestingly written to me. The title implies that, as an interview, the reader may be presented with two voices: one as the interviewer asking questions and one as the interviewee answering them. This story, however, was all in one voice of the interviewee and there are only blank lines where the questions should be. In doing this, Wallace leaves it up to the reader to develop their own ideas of what the question may have been to produce the kind of answers we hear.
The character in the story, Johnny One Arm, is extremely strange. Wallace writes his answers to truly resemble an interview, with longer sentences, running on as if in honest conversation. Also, the way Johnny One Arm speaks is something to look at. He uses his arm as a way to attract women to him and gain their sympathy, only to turn around and use it against them to make them sleep with him. He calls his disfigured arm and “asset” because of this. I think that is disgustingly realistic of what some people would do in that situation.
Something else that struck me was that Wallace capitalized every word that was used in an interaction between Johnny One Arm and the girls he tries to convince to go to bed with him. I am not sure why Wallace does this, but it does do something. Capitalization draws the reader’s attention more to those words, implying some kind of extra importance to them. I think this may be the case for Wallace, or it may be a simple distinction between everything else that is written.