Theological Trends Column

This article was published exclusively online in the Christian Research Journal, Volume 49, number 03 (2026).

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In No Exit, a play by Jean-Paul Sartre, the character Joseph Garcin famously concludes, “Hell is — other people!”¹ In The Cocktail Party, a play by T. S. Eliot, the character Edward Chamberlayne counters this view by observing, “What is hell? Hell is oneself.”² Although the differences between Sartre and Eliot are profound, both present hell as a form of entrapment, either by other people or within oneself. Both writers, in fact, see modern humans as prone to feeling trapped. In Something to Do with Paying Attention, David Foster Wallace considers a young man who also feels trapped. This young man narrates his own story, which traces his journey from “nihilist wastoid” to IRS bureaucrat. Nameless throughout, he begins by acknowledging his difficulty with recalling the past. “To be honest,” he says, “a good bit of it I don’t remember. I don’t think my memory works in quite the way it used to. It may be that this kind of work [examining tax returns] changes you….For the most part, it’s now almost as if I’m trapped in the present.”³ The observation is odd, especially since he tells his story as an escape from nihilism. Thus, it raises a question: Why does he feel trapped in the present?

Born into a middle-class social and economic milieu, the narrator suffers, nonetheless, from existential poverty. Formed neither by religion nor by substantive cultural tradition, he floats from one meaningless, often drug-addled experience to another, living, by his own description, as a nihilistic wastoid, free-floating, free-loading, feckless, aimless, lazy, and apathetic.⁴

I think the truth is that I was the worst kind of nihilist — the kind who isn’t even aware he’s a nihilist. I was like a piece of paper on the street in the wind, thinking, “Now I think I’ll blow this way, now I think I’ll blow that way.” My essential response to everything was “Whatever.”⁵

Although he attends parties and “hangs out” with peers, he reports no relationships other than his fraught relationship with his mother and father, from whom he is emotionally distant. The narrator also has little to say about his education before college, other than to record a period of difficulty with reading caused by his penchant to count letters rather than decode words.⁶ He gleaned nothing from his teachers that could challenge his predilection to apathy. Whatever benefits his primary and secondary education conferred on him intellectually, it had no enlivening effect upon his soul. Whether this is the fault of his teachers, or of the educational system, or of his own deadness of spirit, I do not know. But the lack of even one memorable moment suggests a young man adrift in a miasma of nihilism.

For Wallace, this nameless young nihilist represents a significant strand of America’s post-World War II generation, and of each generation thereafter. As a representative nihilist, he is morally confused and unhappy because he has no idea what his life is for. At the various colleges and universities he attends, including Lindenhurst College and the University of Illinois Chicago, there are many others like him.

Everyone I knew and hung out with was a wastoid, and we knew it. It was hip to be ashamed of it, in a strange way. A weird kind of narcissistic despair. Or just to feel directionless and lost — we romanticized it.⁷

There are exceptions, though. Some youths, such as the meritocratic super-achievers at the University of Chicago, are not so obviously full of despair. But though he acknowledges that these young people exist, he feels no connection to them and makes no effort to understand them.⁸

A student in the humanities, he reports that everyone — professors included — is cynical. They discuss moral questions armored by irony, afraid that to be morally earnest is to be a naïve rube. Their cynical practices imply that a morally earnest life is an intentional deception or an illusion, the mistaken belief that some things are in fact good and others bad.⁹ “I drifted and quit,” he says, “because nothing meant anything, no one choice was really better….I was free to choose ‘whatever’ because it didn’t really matter.…I didn’t stand for anything.”¹⁰ His agnostic stance toward the good implies there is no truth to be found.¹¹ And yet this narrator also acknowledges something deeper:

I’m not the smartest person, but even during that whole pathetic, directionless period, I think that deep down I knew that there was more to my life and to myself than just the ordinary psychological impulses for pleasure and vanity that I let drive me. That there were depths to me that were not bullshit or childish but profound, and were not abstract but actually much realer than my clothes or self-image, and that blazed in an almost sacred way…if only I could stay awake off speed.¹²

Why then can this young man not access, nourish, and live from these depths?

A Father’s Example — and Its Limits. That question brings me to the disconcerting character of his father. By the narrator’s own description, his father is a man of great personal dignity, careful in fulfilling his duty. He possesses a rich but private intellectual life in which he takes refuge from the banalities of his profession and the vulgarities of the modern world.¹³ Constant, consistent, and self-disciplined, he is a stalwart example of responsible manhood, even when his wife leaves them to live as a lesbian.¹⁴ In response to which he tells his son, “people are going to do what they’re going to do, and all you can really do is play the hand that life deals you to the best of your ability.”¹⁵ He attended a technical college and works in logistics for the city of Chicago. Wishing he could have done otherwise but prevented by finances and family responsibilities, he lives a stoic life. “The point is,” observes the narrator, “that he was very smart and somewhat unfulfilled, like many of his generation. He worked hard because he had to, and his own dreams were put on the back burner.”¹⁶ Nevertheless, he is fastidious in the performance of his professional and personal duties, finding solace in the sublime shelter of Romantic poetry.

Painfully aware of his son’s nihilism, he looks upon the younger generation with ironic disapproval. Quoting from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous sonnet “Ozymandias” (1818), he refers to the narrator and his peers as the works upon which the mighty are invited to look and despair.¹⁷  “He sometimes,” recalls the narrator, “referred to the so-called younger generation (meaning mine) as ‘This thing America hath wrought.’…It’s almost like he thought the blame went both ways, that there was something wrong with the whole country’s adults if they could produce kids like this in the 1970s.”¹⁸ Convinced that his own generation holds some responsibility for the plight of his son’s, he seems nevertheless unable to help. He is wary of giving advice — even to his own child — because he considers it vain to assume the role of a wisdom oracle.¹⁹ More disconcerting is that he believes his son is unequal to any advice he might offer, even though the boy seems — at times — to desire such advice. As a father myself, I understand his reticence, even as I find it troubling.

The narrator feels his father’s expectations for him, as well as his disapproval when he fails to meet them. And these expectations do seem to prevent a full-tilt dive into a nihilistic abyss. At the very least, they keep him from being too comfortable in his nihilism or with the drug-addled partying that leaves him dazed and confused and ashamed.²⁰ They do not, however, anchor or direct him. Whatever wisdom or solace his father finds in literature, he passes none of it to his son. Though raised a Catholic, the father has no adult relationship with the church. Other than the example (not to be undervalued) of his own behavior, he offers nothing that is distinctly good, nothing from which the narrator might nourish his soul. Like a strong fence built across a swift-flowing river, the father’s example prevents his son from plunging over the falls of nihilism but offers no path out of the torrent. “Like many of my generation,” observes the narrator, “I wasn’t raised as anything.”²¹ Indeed, if the narrator strikes in any clear way, it is as a young man spiritually malnourished.

I intend here to be more descriptive than critical. Having raised two children and taught in American high schools for twenty-five years, I know something of how difficult it is to pass one’s convictions to the next generation. After all, there exists neither blueprint nor schematic nor fail-proof system for rearing children. I also know that some children receive instruction easily while others do not. Ultimately, they are responsible for their own choices. But I do wonder what further effect the father might have had, had his own spiritual horizon opened on more than stoic pessimism. A man of dignity and principle, he is out of step with a society given to consumerism. But some institutions — such as the church — upon which he might have relied for aid in the formation of his son, he abandoned himself.

When the narrator’s father dies in a bizarre train accident, his predicament is deepened. Now he must find his way, lacking even the minimal motivation provided by his father’s disapproval. And so another disturbing question arises: What is a young man in this situation to do? We could dismiss him as the nihilistic wastoid he claims to be. We could pass him by as one who, since he is not actively destructive, merits no further thought. We could write him off as a loser or chalk him up as a casualty of degraded humanism, a lost cause to whom the IRS is welcome. But his plight evokes my compassion — for a young man abandoned to his lowest impulses by a community who should have provided him guidance, leaving him no higher vision of human life, so that the professional standards of the Internal Revenue Service become his best option.

Meaning Through Struggle. In keeping with the apparent role of chance in this novella, his path out of nihilism is convoluted. A pastiche of events — the mind-focusing effects of Adderall, the irritating conversion story of a smug, evangelical girl, a moment of self-awareness brought on by the soap opera As the World Turns — combine to reveal him a bystander in his own life. This epiphany, followed by his mistakenly attending a lecture for the Advanced Tax course instead of a lecture on American political philosophy, leads to another epiphany and to his finally completing an accounting degree at DePaul University.

The speech on modern heroism by the Advanced Tax professor whose zeal helps to convert him is worth quoting at length.

To retain care and scrupulosity about each detail from within the teeming wormball of data and rule and exception and contingency which constitutes real-world accounting — this is heroism. To attend fully to the interests of the client and to balance those interests against the high ethical standards of FASB and extant law — yea, to serve those who care not for service but only for results — this is heroism. This may be the first time you’ve heard the truth put plainly, starkly. Effacement. Sacrifice. Service. To give oneself to the care of others’ money — this is effacement, perdurance, sacrifice, honor, doughtiness, valor. Hear this or not, as you will. Learn it now, or later — the world has time. Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui — these are the true hero’s enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.²²

Rhetorically, this moment is the novella’s most compelling. Initially, the narrator is struck by the seriousness of the students. Future accountants and business leaders, they are dressed like professionals; they are organized; and they are determined to learn as much from their professor as possible.²³ He is also impressed by the professor’s authority, a function of his knowledge, his professional attire, his conviction that tax work is important, and his utter indifference to whether or not his students like him.²⁴   Although the narrator at first assumes him to be among the last of the old Jesuits who represent DePaul University’s intellectual origins, it is by no means clear that he is one. More than likely, he is a secularized descendant of the Jesuit tradition, one who has retained the grammar of their discipline without the religious belief that first animated it. He speaks with authority, is untroubled by ambiguity, and displays conviction without naivete. These qualities have a powerful effect on his students and especially on the narrator.

The professor informs — this word is important, as he does not suggest, hint, argue, or allude — them that their future work taking care of other people’s money is important, even heroic.²⁵ Indeed, he insists that tax accounting is the modern moral equivalent of war — a life in which selfless duty, discipline, sacrifice, and demanding rigor are still necessary, a life wherein one can be shaped by these rigors into a person of virtue. He tells them that the older forms of heroism are no longer available, that the world having been conquered and tamed, what remains is to order and divide it according to the rules of the tax code. Such work demands of them a complementary moral code marked by care, discipline, endurance, selflessness, and service in obscurity.²⁶ Here is real heroic effort: to build a professional career by applying the tedious minutiae of bureaucratic tax rules to endless tax returns. The obscurity and thanklessness under which they will labor make their duty and sacrifice that much more heroic. Were it not that he seems utterly unconcerned with happiness, one could imagine him affirming of the tax accountant what Albert Camus does of Sisyphus: “the struggle toward the heights is enough [or, in this case, all that remains] to fill a man’s [or an accountant’s] heart.”²⁷ He offers meaning through struggle, captivating the narrator with his Sisyphean scheme.

With such words, an elder professional calls the narrator “to account.”²⁸ And thus begins his journey out of nihilism. Accepting the existential challenge of professional accountancy, he will create meaning through structure, order, discipline, routine, and “heroic” endurance of tedium. Embracing an arduous profession undertaken for the good of a society that will never feel gratitude for what he does, he derives meaning from the difficulty itself. Here, finally, is something to claim his allegiance, fire his imagination, and provide him the motivation to change, something at once difficult and attainable that gives form and purpose to his life. He finishes college, passes his CPA exams, and commits to a life of service in the IRS. Having found something greater than himself, he is no longer — by his own estimation — a nihilistic wastoid but a contributing member of society and a mature adult.

Is That All? At just this point, however, this story of one man’s escape from nihilism begins to sour. For something is missing from this life rescued from the brink of the abyss. It lacks an avenue of transcendence, and it lacks anything that is actually worth loving. I think the narrator feels the absence too, for nothing in his tone suggests joy or fullness of heart. Where is there anything to love? There is duty. There is order. There is structure. There is purpose to his life. He lives now by discipline and marks out a routine that shapes in him a kind of faithfulness. He has internalized the speech and ideals of the professor of tax and made the professional standards of the Internal Revenue Service his own. He is an adult, which — given his starting point — is no mean achievement. But he is also a bureaucratic functionary whose identity is exhausted by his professional role. Thus, despite my sense that he is better off than he was before, the lack of relationships and of a transcendent horizon leaves the impression that he is not much better off.

Furthermore, his new life — lacking significant continuity with his old one — offers only discrete moments. Thus, he seems to exist entirely within the bureaucratic structure of the IRS. He chose this role primarily for its difficulty, as if the struggle to become and to be an IRS tax examiner could, of itself, give his life meaning, as if arduous conditions could justify his life rather than an objectively good telos, as if by determining to become something specific, he overcomes his essential nothingness. In this regard, he is an existentialist. Entombed in a world without transcendent meaning, he makes his own immanent meaning by way of effort and commitment. In this way, he is, as noted above, reminiscent of Camus’ Sisyphus. Choosing the rock of IRS service, he rolls it up the mountain of striving, fully aware that it will simply roll back down when his life ends. But despite Camus’ insistence that “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,”²⁹ this narrator definitely is not.

I suspect Wallace feels his unhappiness but considers it beyond his own or the narrator’s power to overcome. Instead, we read of a young man who concentrates his efforts and attention on what seems achievable. His choice is significantly more compelling than Meursault’s, the protagonist in The Stranger (1942), another of Camus’ famous works, who allows his belief that life is meaningless to dissuade him from trying for anything meaningful and falls prey to his own murderous impulses. It bears some resemblance to Binx Bolling’s final decision, in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (1961), to become a doctor and thus fill a socially meaningful role. But Binx’s decision includes marriage to a woman he loves, and some suspicion that their love is a sign of and a means to real transcendence — that there is a God whose creative and redemptive purpose confers meaning on his life.³⁰

The narrator of this story, however, has no such inkling.

Except for two interesting but ambiguous hints. As noted above, the narrator says he feels trapped in the present. Is this suspicion a hint that he knows his victory to be pyrrhic? If so, then the rest of the book seems a way to account for his current entrapment, to discern, in the arc of his journey from nihilism to tax examiner, a thread that might lead to wider vistas of possibility. Oddly, he begins to recognize that his narrative arc follows the same trajectory as that of an annoying evangelical Christian girl at his college, whose story of conversion, like his own, begins with her feeling lost and empty but ends with her happening upon a church service where the minister’s (vague) sermon seemed to tell her exactly what she needed in that very moment to hear. Although he strongly dislikes this girl and her story, upon reflection he acknowledges — grudgingly — that his conversion to tax accountancy and her conversion to Christianity are structurally parallel.³¹ Of course, nothing about the inner state of either convert confers objective value on the content of the message either one heard. Such ambiguity probably signals Wallace’s own distrust of conversion stories, especially of their epistemic value — except that he is telling one, fictional though it be.

Yet whatever Wallace or the narrator thinks of Christianity, it is impossible for me to read the narrator’s conversion to the IRS as equivalent to a genuine religious conversion, which takes seriously the spiritual nature of humanity and the reality of a transcendent God. Whether or not Wallace would acknowledge this difference, I cannot, from this novella alone, be certain. The evangelical convert in this story seems barely to understand the faith she professes, claiming as she does that since her conversion she has experienced not a moment of sadness. One is inclined to recommend she read the books of Job, Psalms, and Ecclesiastes, or any serious work of literature, or perhaps just live a few more years, attentive to her own inner life. But whatever one thinks of this girl’s religious conversion, the narrator’s conversion presses one to ask, “Is that all?” For his conversion is insufficient to the existential problem it aims to address.

A young man struggles to find meaning in a spiritually desiccated world. He reaches as high as he can, but what he grasps fails to satisfy him. Wallace, I think, is dissatisfied too. His story left me wrestling with why its narrator does not find Christ more compelling and pondering how we might show Him so to be.

Stephen Mitchell holds a PhD in humanities from Faulkner University. He teaches English at Covenant Day School in Matthews, North Carolina, and at Covenant College.

Notes: 

1. Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit, trans. Stuart Gilbert, in No Exit and Three Other Plays (Vintage Books, 1976; No Exit orig. pub. 1944), 47.
2. T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party, in The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (Faber and Faber, 1969; The Cocktail Party orig. pub. 1950), 397.
3. David Foster Wallace, Something to Do with Paying Attention (McNally Editions, 2021), 3. The novella first appeared as a section of Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King, published posthumously (Little, Brown and Company, 2011).
4. Wallace, Paying Attention, 14.
5. Wallace, Paying Attention, 3.
6. Wallace, Paying Attention, 11–12.
7. Wallace, Paying Attention, 17.
8. Wallace, Paying Attention, 15–17.
9. Wallace, Paying Attention, 83–84.
10. Wallace, Paying Attention, 97–98.
11. Wallace, Paying Attention, 47.
12. Wallace, Paying Attention, 48.
13. Wallace, Paying Attention, 22.
14. Wallace, Paying Attention, 76.
15. Wallace, Paying Attention, 55.
16. Wallace, Paying Attention, 21.
17. Wallace, Paying Attention, 25.
18. Wallace, Paying Attention, 22.
19. Wallace, Paying Attention, 76–77.
20. Wallace, Paying Attention, 22–27.
21. Wallace, Paying Attention, 52.
22. Wallace, Paying Attention, 107–108.
23. Wallace, Paying Attention, 86–91.
24. Wallace, Paying Attention, 92 and 100–102.
25. Wallace, Paying Attention, 102–103.
26. Wallace, Paying Attention, 104–108 and 120.
27. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (Vintage International, 1983; The Myth of Sisyphus orig. pub. 1942), 123.
28. Wallace, Paying Attention, 110.
29. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 123.
30. For a discussion of Percy’s The Moviegoer and other novels, see Stephen Mitchell, “Opening-Out Delight: Romantic Love as Divine Sign in the Novels of Walker Percy,” Christian Research Journal 48, no.03 (2025), https://www.equip.org/articles/opening-out-delight-romantic-love-as-divine-sign-in-the-novels-of-walker-percy/.
31. Wallace, Paying Attention, 93.