David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion: Stories includes eight tales about life in the late 20th and early 21st century.
The book’s theme is that the information onslaught of life in the 1990s and 2000s causes us to forget (the root meaning of “oblivion”) not only what is most important but also what is most obvious.
Wallace intensifies the book’s pessimism and bleakness by removing any possibility that God exists.
The characters fear their lives are empty or do not matter. If they have externally successful lives, they fear they are fraudulent. They struggle to tell the difference between fantasy and reality.
The Christian God offers answers to these questions. By revealing himself in scripture, He demonstrates language’s power. By creating people in his image, he testifies to their worth. By knowing the universe entirely, he can define objective reality and quell the fears of fraudulence.
Covenantally, the story’s preclude the Transcendent. As a result, characters bear ethical burdens they cannot sustain on their own. By forgetting God—whose reality is all around them—they reap judgment.
Experiments in Criticism 