Boswell claims that the reader of “Brief Interviews” is in the position of interviewer, and challenged to empathize with the hideous men:
Wallace wants to test the boundaries of our willingness to “empathize,” since the men we, as readers, interview are, as they are advertised to be, hideous. [...] Moreover, they do not engage in dialogue, properly speaking, since Wallace presents only their answers to questions which are erased from the text. The reader assumes the position of someone who literally cannot get a word in edgewise. The reader’s empathy, then, must be pure, since it cannot be returned by these characters.(189)
Considering Boswell’s claim and the female pronoun “she” that the narrator in “Octet” uses to address the assumed reader[ The actual reader is addressed as “you” as the author of the pop quizzes.], the relationship between speaker and listener or writer and reader can be generalized into abstract male-female relationship. The two relationship is a exemplar of the difficult empathy. Nixon argues that “Q”s signify abstract image of “women,” thus revealing the hideous nature of male sexuality, and becomes “simply a space into which the excess personality of men is dispensed”(221-22). …show more content…
The figure who keeps talking about her agony on the phone and takes psychiatric therapy in which she mainly speaks is a epitome of the hideous men’s interview. The depressed person shows misgivings of the possibility to make use of others, and her trouble of building mutually nurturing relationship with men. She is grateful for her Support System member for just “Being There” and she is fearful for giving the impression of her manipulating the friend(59). “Being There[ The capitalization of “Be There” is equivalent of that in the Pop Quiz 6 in “Octet”]” is the opposite idea of “use” or “manipulate” others like her parents used her as a pawn of their