The Narrator In David Foster Wallace's Short Story 'Good Old Neon'

In the opening lines of David Foster Wallace’s short story, “Good Old Neon,” the protagonist and narrator Neal describes himself as follows: “My whole life I’ve been a fraud. I’m not exaggerating. Pretty much all I’ve ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people” (141). In saying this, Neal sets up a self-aware yet self-deprecating representation of himself. Seemingly, Neal (who is a ghost in “Good Old Neon”) understands his hamartia, or tragic flaw, as inauthenticity. However, a closer reading of Neal’s choice of language shows that he is an unreliable narrator. In fact, he is intentionally unreliable as a narrator because he wants to “come across someone who is [his] match and can’t be fooled.” In other

words, Neal is testing the insight, or what he refers to as the “firepower” of the reader (147, 155). Wallace’s reason for making Neal an unreliable narrator, then, is to illustrate that even in death Neal is incapable of escaping his need to try to create a certain false impression of himself.
Initially, Neal structures his narration in such a way as to hint at the fact that he has fraudulently characterized himself. Sometimes he deliberately speaks in sentences that deviate from the expected verb tense. For example, in line 1 (“My whole life I’ve been a fraud”), Neal uses the present perfect tense to describe his false nature (141). The present perfect tense “describes an action that began in the past and continues in the present” (Escalas). Rather than using the past tense to say he was a fraud before death, Neal is suggesting that he continues to be a fraud after death. Subtleties in verb tense like this counter Neal’s self-aware yet self-deprecating characterization and challenge the reader to filter the deception in his narration.
Similarly, Neal saying “later I was in analysis,” using the active voice of grammar, also exemplifies when the structure (in association with the temporal) of his narration reveals intentional fraud (142). Had Neal used the passive voice (“later I was analyzed”), it would have been absolutely clear that he meant he was seen by someone else (in this case, a psychologist). As the sentence stands in active voice, its structure causes an ambiguous meaning. On one hand, it could refer to Neal being seen by someone else. On the other hand, it could refer to Neal as the one who is doing the analyzing. If we take it to mean that Neal is analyzing himself, he is suggesting that he is not who he seems to be. This again prompts the reader to not be fooled by Neal’s unreliability as a narrator.
Furthermore, Neal’s reliance on long sentences and even longer paragraphs, in addition to myriad parenthetical remarks, suggests that he is overcompensating, which points to him being an unreliable narrator.

Repeatedly, Neal insists that his sentiments are “long, rushing, and clumsy” so as “to convey the way I remember it,” or portray his narrative authentically (148, 150). Repetition of this explanation, coupled with an appeal to the reader to sympathize with his ramblings—“I know that you know as well as I do how fast thoughts and associations can fly through your head”—could give Neal credibility and reinforce his self-aware yet self-deprecating characterization (150). In contrast, another reading of Neal’s reiterated explanations of his garrulousness, coupled with his appeal, is that he is overcompensating to come off as honest. But he is deliberately overdoing it to the extent that he exposes himself as an imposter. As such, Neal is testing whether the reader can tell that he is overcompensating. In support of this point, the way that the appeal begins, “I know that know you as well as I do,” has an exaggerated or overstated tone (150). Overcompensation is also reflected in Neal’s overuse of tangential parenthetical remarks, some of them half a page or more in length. Overcompensation is further manifested in the content of the remarks themselves. In one case, Neal begins, “To be honest, I knew it was Cézanne because . . .” (146). Parentheticals “are said while one is

talking about something else in order to explain or add information,” rendering what precedes them as realistic (“Parenthetical” from Merriam-Webster Dictionary). It is therefore redundant for Neal to insist that he is being honest.
Just as Neal uses structure to hint at his unreliability as a narrator, his use of vague language also suggests that he is not describing things honestly. Take, for example, when Neal expresses his regret over not having seen Angela Mead for who she was: “I never even really saw her, I couldn’t see anything except who I might be in her eyes” (141). He then adds, “Having her let me get my hand under her blouse and not even feeling the soft aliveness or whatever of her breast” (141). Neal’s use of the vague phrase “or whatever” signifies that even after death he still does not understand what he should have been feeling. Furthermore, by saying “or whatever,” Neal reveals that he is feigning a self-aware yet self-deprecating characterization. In support of this point, Neal not only admits he never saw who Angela was in the past, but also, he vaguely delves into who she is in the present. He states the facts about Angela: “She’s a veterinarian now, with her own practice” (141–142). For Neal, who is feigning a self-aware yet self-deprecating character to test the reader, Angela is seen as the vague totality of facts, rather than as a human being.
Along the same lines, the phrase “or whatever” comes up frequently in Neal’s narration. Another example is when Neal realizes that he was a fraud even when he was at church; he says, “It was only when I was walking out to the parking lot one night after Wednesday Night Praise that I suddenly experienced a flash of self-awareness or clarity or whatever” (158). Here the phrase “or whatever” deconstructs Neal’s attempt to portray himself as a self-aware yet self-deprecating individual because the phrase reads as if Neal is only saying these things to make himself appear this way. Neal is thus akin to an actor playing a role. From this, we can see that Neal’s true character is insincere, and his descriptions of himself are unreliable. He is challenging the reader to use “firepower” to see him for who and what he really is (155).
Additionally, the motif of mathematics also functions to reveal Neal’s ulterior motives in fraudulently portraying himself a certain way (via conjuring the imagery of something askew). Mathematical elements—convergence and divergence, geometry, limits, theorems, and series—are omnipresent tropes in Neal’s narration. They first appear in the following quote: “There was a basic logical paradox that I called the ‘fraudulence paradox’ that I had discovered . . . while taking a mathematical logic course” (147). The imagery of a square (a geometric shape), is repeated three times. When describing a painting by Cézanne, Neal says, “Which was a still life, and which was weirdly discomfiting because there was something slightly off about the perspective or style that made . . . the apple look almost square” (146). Neal identities something jarring and wrong about the apple in that it is square. The square imagery is repeated when Neal describes himself and his actions during a period of sexual escapades: “I racked up a total of thirty-six [women] for sixty-one” (143). Not only is thirty-six the square of six (six by six producing a square with area thirty-six) but also sixty-one minus thirty-six is the square of five (five by five producing a square with area twenty-five). Herein, Neal has strongly associated himself and his actions with the image of a square. In doing so, he demonstrates that there is something jarring or wrong about his narration that he wants the reader to recognize.
Another mathematical element that works to show Neal’s unreliability is the number nine.

It comes up when Neal says, “I more or less conned myself into sticking with going to see Dr. G. … for almost nine months” (164). By saying “nine months,” Neal is evoking the image of pregnancy. Neal is metaphorically pregnant; like an expectant mother, Neal is carrying an interior self within an exterior self. However, for Neal, this interior self is one of fraudulence and insincerity – which he wants the reader to identify – beneath an exterior façade of a self-aware yet self-deprecating character. This pregnancy imagery is fleshed out by Neal referring to Dr. Gustafson in this sentence as “Dr. G.,” which alludes to a doctor of gynecology

(164).
For the most part, Neal frames his narration around Dr. Gustafson’s failure to cure him of his inauthenticity. According to Neal, Dr. Gustafson fails because he possesses limited insight: “I was paying this guy for helping in getting out of the trap and he’d now showed that he didn’t have the mental firepower to do it” (155). Being let down by the doctor pushes Neal over the edge: “I’d pretty much given up on Dr. Gustafson and was starting to think of various ways to kill myself” (155). Wallace’s construction of the ghost of Neal as an unreliable narrator supports this notion that Neal died having not been cured of his fraudulent nature. The ghost of Neal is left to act as an intentionally unreliable narrator (as seen through the use of language) to finally come across someone with the mental “firepower” to cure him. Therein, Wallace writes “Good Old Neon” as a ghost story: besides the narrator being a ghost, the narrator is haunted by wanting to encounter someone with the capacity to set his fraudulent soul free.