Chapters 23 through 26 Summary

In Chapter 23, the speaker relates a dream about boredom. In Chapter 24, the narrator, again David Wallace, continue to present himself as the author. Wallace is hired by the IRS as a GS-9 examiner, an entry-level position. He and several other new hires are picked up from an IRS temporary housing facility by a van seized for tax default. The van is full of people and Wallace sits next to Cusk; the two characters are squeezed together. The drive is related in agonizing detail and the last portion of the commute—the turn from the road into the IRS REC parking lot—takes forever. The entire history of the road, the parking structure, and the intersection is examined with the narrator concluding it was designed on purpose to be inefficient and irritating. When the van finally arrives all of the...