In David Foster Wallace Fiction and Form David Hering analyses the structures of David Foster Wallaces fiction from his debut The Broom of the Systemto his final unfinished novel The Pale King. Incorporating extensive analysis of Wallaces drafts notes and letters and taking account of the rapidly expanding field of Wallace scholarship this book argues that the form of Wallaces fiction is always inextricably bound up within an ongoing conflict between the monologic and the dialogic one strongly connected with Wallaces sense of his own authorial presence and identity in the work. Hering suggests that this conflict occurs at the level of both subject and composition analysing the importance of a number of provocative structural and critical contexts ghostliness institutionality reflection to the fiction while describing how this argument is also visible within the development of Wallaces manuscripts comparing early drafts with published material to offer a careerlong framework of the construction of Wallaces fiction. The final chapter offers an unprecedentedly detailed analysis of the troubled decadelong construction of the work that became The Pale King.