Summary

The action is continuous, as the conversation between Bella and Christopher continues. The focus is primarily on what Bella and Christopher say to each other, but Bella does still turn to the audience and offer present-tense comments on what she is experiencing during the conversation. He challenges her with his knowledge of how Dostoevsky (the author of Crime and Punishment) died, and how some of the author’s better-known sayings were actually “unassailable platitude[s]” (23). In poetic, literary language he imagines how Dostoevsky thought of his own writing, and comments on how “these days the novelist has to either be really good at Twitter or commit suicide” to have “his work matter” (23). Bella calls that cynical, and Christopher gives her a list of authors who killed themselves, with Bella commenting that only one – David Foster Wallace – might have had a Twitter account...