Point of View

Throughout "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men," Wallace writes in a dramatically different point of view with almost each new story, and that style usually significantly informs the themes of the story. The most frequently used point of view in this collection in the first-person monologue: after a brief scene-setting header, the entire story is written as if it is "from the mouth" of a single speaker. These stories are written with an emphasis on realism: just as, in day-to-day speech, one would not naturally say several identifying traits about one's surroundings, the speakers in "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" do not, either.

Most of the other stories in this collection are told in the third person, although there are substantively different types of third-person narrators. The narration of some stories is told in an incredibly detail-oriented, almost scientific third-person, such as "Death is Not the...