Donald W. Winnicott’s Transitional Phenomena and the Re-Emergence of the Self in David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest

This study explores David Foster Wallace’s fiction’s treatment of the self according to Donald W. Winnicott’s psychoanalytic theories of transitional phenomena and emotional development. The thesis focuses on Wallace’s first two novels, The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest, with a broader view on the evolution of the writer’s preoccupation with the individual and the author’s self. The application of Winnicott’s theory of transitional phenomena to the reading of Wallace’s fiction acknowledges the paradoxical nature of a self always in a creative process, caught between subjectivity and objectivity, individual and society, author and readers. Such Winnicottian concepts as the split of the self into true self and false self, the identification of the false self with the mind, and the right not to communicate help locate Wallace’s fiction beyond postmodern relativism, within the realm of post-postmodern relationalism.