J. M. Coetzee’s Literature of Hospice

It is no mere coincidence that the fictional character Leonard Bankhead in Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot resembles the author David Foster Wallace. By directly invoking Wallace, Eugenides engages in an artistic battle with Wallace that both parodies Wallace’s public battles with his postmodern forebears and transforms Harold Bloom’s Oedipal model of artistic influence into a love triangle. The Marriage Plot not only revives the traditional love story through metafictional parody but also playfully pits Eugenides against Wallace as rivals for the reader’s affection.