Trying to decide if they should / leave the things that keep them crying

A friend was asking me awhile back about the phenomenology of depression. She had difficulty understanding what it could be like, e.g., to feel so hopeless about one's existence that fleeing from consciousness (through sleep or psychotropics) seems the only feasible path, despite full awareness of how it only makes the next day worse. It's not something easily explained; the best I could do, really, was point her to this article in Rolling Stone about David Foster Wallace's struggle with depression and Wallace's own story "The Depressed Person."

It took me awhile to understand my own reactions to that story. When I first read it, years ago, I hated it--it inspired a rage in me usually reserved for news of contemporary politics or people being wrong on the Internet. A little too close to home, clearly; I couldn't distance myself enough to appreciate it. I didn't read it again until recently, when I heard Wallace had hanged himself; the news put the story in a rather different light.

Reading it a second time was still painful; I had to put it aside more than once. But what makes it so hard to read is precisely what makes it brilliant, at least in my mind: reading the story makes you hate the pseudonarrator as much as she hates herself, for the same reasons she hates herself. And as you come to despise her in just the way she feels she deserves, her pathetic and contemptible behavior becomes understandable--without thereby becoming any less contemptible.

Wallace explains her suffering by making the reader part of it--by making the reader simultaneously despise the depressed person, understand her to share that loathing, and yet hate her still more for inflicting her self-obsessed bathos on others (a hatred which she, of course, also shares): an unending spiral of contempt and self-aware, self-destructive action. It's a really neat trick.

Of course, this could simply be my own idiosyncratic reaction. I don't think of myself as a particularly sophisticated reader, and I've never taken any classes in literary interpretation. But it works for me, and it makes me appreciate the story quite a bit. Wallace certainly captures the tragic reflexivity of depression, the way it feeds off of self-awareness and the need to see oneself as a responsible agent, more vividly than my own bloodless philosophical musings are able to.