The discussion part of David Foster Wallace's Host was very interesting, as everyone had one thing in common to say about: "boxes". There were different opinions about the boxes; helpful, misleading, important, negligible, long, short, and so on. Whatever there was to say, the boxes were irritating. The arrows led from words to boxes and the content in the boxes served the purpose of footnotes. Usually i would ignore footnotes unless there was something interesting, but the boxes here were hard to ignore as they were right in the middle of the text. And excluding them felt as if you were missing out on something.
It took me quite a time to do this reading and i would often get mad as the boxes made me pause, but the humor part kept me going.
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I think that the compulsion to read the boxes is why David Foster Wallace elected to use them rather than the common and often negligable footnotes. He forces us the read the story from a journalistic standpoint as well as more of a personal standpoint this way. You may have been irritated by the boxes, but I was sort of intrigued by this unique style.
I kinda understand what DFW has attepted to do but I am not too amused by his style of writing either. It was something never seen before.
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