Fiction As a Conversation: Unreliable Narrators, Pop Culture, and Violence in David Foster Wallace’s “Girl With Curious Hair” and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho

Abstract

David Foster Wallace and Bret Easton Ellis are known for their contributions to postmodern literature; however, they also developed a contentious relationship outside of their literary works. But what caused this conflict between the two writers? Although they were often in competition with one another as literary contemporaries who both explored postmodernism, the real issue between the two writers is the difference in how they envisioned and portrayed a postmodern world. While both Wallace and Ellis utilize irony, examine collectivist identities, and critique equality in the West, they do so with a different endgame in mind—namely, Wallace’s idea that the postmodern world encourages a deeper look into notions of selfhood that extend beyond Ellis’s cynical emphasis on surface and superficiality. A comparative approach of “Girl With Curious Hair” (1989) and American Psycho (1991) offers fresh perspectives on how Wallace and Ellis utilized similar themes to contrast their different points of view regarding the postmodern world. (SSL)