Summary Of Shipping Out By David Foster Wallace

Everyone has a secret. As we go about our days, we all put up a persona to hide our secret, our shadow. In “Stay: the Archetypal Space of the Hotel”, Jennifer M. Volland introduces how hotels allow for fluidity between Carl Jung’s idea of persona and shadow; someone’s persona is how the world sees them, while their shadow is their secret self. In David Foster Wallace’s essay, “Shipping Out”, he recounts his seven night trip aboard a luxury cruise. In retelling his journey, we see Wallace’s persona that everyone else sees, but Wallace also allows us to see his shadow, paranoia. David Foster Wallace’s essay “Shipping Out” reveals his shadow personality of paranoia, fear, and anxiety, and also shows how a luxury ship can have a shadow personality,

Among the female passengers and the few female crew members we see him interact with, Wallace is funny and likeable; with the male passengers, Wallace is more withdrawn. Wallace wants to be liked by the women on the ship because he enjoys the attention that they give, but the men make him feel less like a man. In “Some Organized Fun”, Wallace attends a navigation lecture hosted by the ship’s captain. This event is attended by primarily male passengers who have some sort of naval background. These men intimidate Wallace as evident when he says “No way I’m going to raise my hand in this kind of crowd and ask what a knot is” (Wallace 77). In “Under Sail”, we meet Wallace’s tablemates, and he spends most the section describing the women at his table. He enjoys how all of the women “except for Mona” laugh loudly at all of his jokes saying “they all have this curious way of laughing where they sort of scream before they laugh” (Wallace 64). Wallace loves the pure enjoyment in the way the women at his table laugh because they make him feel appreciated and

Wallace immediately renames the Zenith the Nadir, a joke about how the people who go on the cruise are typically older than their fifties and near the end of their lifetimes. The ship advertises itself as a place for people to experience luxury and to want for nothing throughout the seven night cruise. However, as the essay progresses this persona of luxury dissolves into the ship’s nearly suffocating shadow personality of control. The ship is very similar to hotels described by Stephanie Rebick; hotels offer their guests freedom they wouldn’t get home or really anywhere else, yet they are also very controlling. However, the guests allow the hotel to be controlling and voluntarily “subject themselves to a temporary regime” (Rebick 17). The Nadir is the same but more extreme; rather than providing a structure for its guests, it controls everything they do, and it gives them the illusion of choice. For example, there are set eating times, but you can choose to eat by yourself off a limited menu; there are activities that you can partake in onboard the ship but only specific things at specific times. Even the luxurious aspects of the ship are a form of control. Passengers can’t carry their own luggage, and staff is punished if a passenger is seen carrying their own luggage; if a passenger gets up from