[obz900]

For those of you who are fond of postmodern author David Foster Wallace, what personality do you think he exhibits? I don't know if he took the test or not, but maybe one could tell by watching interviews and reading his essays.

[Promethea]

for those of you who are fond of postmodern author david foster wallace, what personality do you think he exhibits? I don't know if he took the test or not, but maybe one could tell by watching interviews and reading his essays.

intp!

.

[Blackbird]

I believe he exhibits the personality of "adorable."

I mean, I could see both INFP and INTP. I love that guy, either way.

EDIT: I actually believe he is INFP, and this is why: at this moment, I am watching an interview where he talks about Infinite Jest. He says that the overwhelming majority of people told him the part they liked most was how funny it was, and this surprised him. He said that he had written it to be a very sad book.

This is not a totally solid proof by any means, but it struck a chord with me. So often I create art with such sadness, about something I consider to be heart-wrenching, but I cover it with a thin film of humor. People look at it and instead of noticing the raw emotion, they say, "Oh, how funny!" This kills me.

However, I know an artistic INTP, and his creations are the opposite. They deal with similar subjects that my art deals with, but they are not covered with this film of humor - they are more raw and open than I could ever bring myself to be. However. When pressed about it, he says, "But these things are not sad. They are just the way the world is." He might even see humor in something I see as tragic.

So again, not an ironclad reason, but once he said that, I sucked in a breath and went, "ohhhh."

[lycanized]

I believe he exhibits the personality of "adorable."

Adorable?!?!? My dear he could be any NF :)

[polaroid sea]

grammatically, i would guess INTP. and in interviews, his mannerisms and the way his memory/word retrieval seemed to work also indicate NT to me. but i think the T is very low or borderline. i definitely wouldn't rule out INFP.

[Brandon Boykin]

I can see INTP, too, but his 2005 commencement speech leads me to believe INFP. It's an amazing Ne way of seeing the world; "consider all possibilities" type stuff.

[Sun Lips]

^ I actually just posted a link to the commencement speech (This Is Water) in another thread. :)

I would agree with INTP or INFP. I think people tend to automatically assume that if someone is an intellectual, they must be a Thinker, but this isn't always the case. In his writings he seems to carry a healthy balance between logic and ethics. Either one seems plausible to me.

RIP.

[Alyosha]

I am absolutely positive he is an INFP.

INTP means Introverted Thinking which means clarity. They dislike unnecessary complexity. If there is one thing David Foster Wallace is, it's unnecessarily complicated. When you get to the core of things, he's basically a Christian, trying to get people to take seriously his values by constantly demonstrating that he is super intelligent. He is beating postmodernism at its own game. Infinite Jest, for example, starts with this mysterious thing happening to someone, and then goes back a year or so, and slowly seems to build up the stage for an extremely complicated, modern retelling of Hamlet. This would be the kind of postmodern novel you'd expect to come out in the 70s or something, but then as it goes on, the details stop mattering, you realize you are reading because you care about the character, not because everything makes sense, and by the end, when it never connects to its start, and the Hamlet retelling never starts, you've forgotten all that. What matters is the end's emotional truth. DFW in a nutshell is, "The world makes no sense. You got that right, Pynchon. But does that make trying to do the right thing always less right? Does that make what is right and wrong less obvious?" This is basically as Fi as you get.

Also, look here. How extremely aware he is of the interviewer, the warmth glowing from him, and the blunt head shakes he sometimes does when stating things he considers true, characteristic of Te users. A function INTPs do not use. He was also a teacher, so you can find lots of students who have written about him, and he was the type of person to say things like, "It might take me a while to remember your names, but once I do, I will never forget them." I think an INTP would fall into a diabetic coma just at the thought of saying something like that.

[Umber]

He's not looking out at the World and seeing a bunch of systems. There are people out there and systems within systems and etc.

[Curiously]

Intp.

R.I.P.

A pure compassionate genius.