David Foster Wallace : fiction and form Machine generated contents note: Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1 Vocality A Flickering Hand Dead and Cold : Reading Wallaces Ghosts Chapter 2 Spatiality In the Middle of the Middle of Nowhere : Regionalism and Institutions Chapter 3 Visuality Seeing by Mirror Light : Wallace on Reflection Chapter 4 Finality Not Even Close to Complete : The Many Forms of The Pale King Works Cited In David Foster Wallace : Fiction and Form David Hering analyses the structures of David Foster Wallaces fiction from his debut The Broom of the System to his final unfinished novel The Pale King. Incorporating extensive analysis of Wallaces drafts notes and letters and taking account of the rapidly expanding field of Wallace scholarship this book argues that the form of Wallaces fiction is always inextricably bound up within an ongoing conflict between the monologic and the dialogic one strongly connected with Wallaces sense of his own authorial presence and identity in the work. Hering suggests that this conflict occurs at the level of both subject and composition analysing the importance of a number of provocative structural and critical contexts ghostliness institutionality reflection to the fiction while describing how this argument is also visible within the development of Wallaces manuscripts comparing early drafts with published material to offer a career long framework of the construction of Wallaces fiction. The final chapter offers an unprecedentedly detailed analysis of the troubled decade long construction of the work that became The Pale King.