Leaving class behind?

Abstract

David Foster Wallace’s novel The Pale King (2011) presents a social mobility narrative marked by the conflicting support for and challenge against the neoliberal ideology of meritocratic individualism. In the Toni Ware sections of the novel, the portrait of the working class is dominated by a solitary genius protagonist. Toni’s escape from poverty relies on both contingent circumstance and personal merit. Even though Toni subverts the myth of the classless society that grounds the middle‐class ideology of consumer capitalism, the way she does so embodies the rugged individualism that underlies precisely this ideology. Interrogating these ambiguities, this essay argues that Wallace’s social mobility narrative of the Toni Ware sections, while going some way toward resisting meritocracy and individualism, also supports these neoliberal middle‐class ideological discourses by making its upwardly mobile protagonist a solitary genius. Moreover, by showing the adult Toni’s rebellion against the myth of the classless society to be an outsider renegade’s descent into sociopathic villainy, the story affirms her subversion yet problematizes individualistic rebellion.