Infinite Summer

According to a Wikipedia article on Don DeLillo, DFW cites DeLillo as an influence. DeLillo makes use of consumer product names in his fiction to explore capitalism's stranglehold on modern society and relationships. For instance, in White Noise there's a scene where the main character's child is talking in her sleep and the father thinks he hears something mystical in the words "Toyota Celica," which she's mumbling. There are televisions speaking throughout; Delillo inserts the messages into a scene without the fragment of speech making any sense in context as a device to show that television in general and advertising in particular are always intruding into consciousness and our attempts at meaning-making. When you read DFW, you can see he's picked up some of the themes from DeLillo in IJ.

I had a thought yesterday:
Not that Wallace seems to dwell too much on extra-North American geopolitics in the book, but let's just presume that maybe the rest of the world (i.e. non-ONAN) isn't running on subsidized time (or at least slips back and forth with ease). So maybe the book's own incessant use of S.T. is a sort of clue to the narration being locked within that world-view/framework?
--Or maybe just the major European powers like blew up or something and ONAN more or less rules the world and imposes S.T. on everyone?

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First-Time Reader
Started: 26 June 2009 | Finished: 25 July 2009

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First-Time Reader
Started: 26 June 2009 | Finished: 25 July 2009