Life & Mortality Quote by David Foster Wallace

Wallace frames sincerity as a kind of controlled self-immolation: the writer volunteering to "sort of die" so the reader can feel something real. The phrasing matters. "Sort of" is a tell - he can’t say the grand thing cleanly without immediately undercutting it. That reflexive hedge is pure Wallace: the intellect reaching for authenticity while simultaneously distrusting the melodrama of reaching for it. He wants the moral drama of sacrifice, but he can’t stop his own internal heckler from cracking wise.

The second sentence exposes the real antagonist: not critics, not craft, but embarrassment. "I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print" admits that in a culture trained to reward cool detachment, earnestness reads as naivete. Wallace is naming the risk of being emotionally legible. To "move the reader" means letting yourself be seen trying, without the protective armor of irony. He even stages the fear in the very act of confessing it - a meta-shiver that both signals vulnerability and tries to preempt ridicule. It's a tightrope: the confession is sincere, yet also a performance of sincerity aware of its own possible failure.

Contextually, it sits inside Wallace's larger project: wrestling American irony into something humane. The line isn’t about martyrdom in any heroic sense; it's about the smaller, daily death of the ego - giving up the safety of being above it all. He’s arguing, almost against his will, that literature’s real gamble is not being clever, but being unprotected.