The View from Mrs. Thompson

Abstract

David Foster Wallace was one of the greatest names of American literature in his generation, being recognized as such since the 1996 release of the novel Infinite Jest, widely considered his masterpiece. Still, the work of David Foster Wallace was not restricted to his non-fictional works. Some of his most known and noted texts were essays, which were published in several North-American magazines and later gathered into the successful collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Consider the Lobster, and Both Flesh and Not. Some essays by Wallace received, in 2012, translations into Portuguese in a collection called Ficando longe do fato de já estar meio que longe de tudo, which published texts that, according to translators Daniel Galera and Daniel Pelizzari, aimed to be an entry point for the Brazilian reader into the work of David Foster Wallace, allowing them to access less complex works from the author before diving into the then unpublished translation of Infinite Jest. Thanks to this selection, which was focused on seducing the reader, and to space constraints, many highly important essays were omitted from the work organized by Galera - among which "The View from Mrs. Thompson", which I translate below. This essay is focused on Wallace's experience as he watched, via television, from a small town in the countryside of the United States, the nine-eleven attacks. Wallace describes not only the moment of the attack, but also the experiences and reactions he notices in himself and in people around him - seeming to indicate, more or less subtly in different parts of the text, that his greatest fear was, perhaps, not fear of terrorism, but of the reaction of his country and his countryman to an attack of such proportions.