Looking through the introduction to Don Gifford’s annotation of Ulysses I saw stated the basic premise (or one of them) of the David Foster Wallace story Good Old Neon—
We are all aware, for example, that we can think and perceive far more in the course of a few minutes of multi-leveled consciousness than we could spell out in words in as many hours.
It crossed my mind that this could have been part of the inspiration for Wallace’s story, but probably a more interesting consideration it raises involves contrasting how Joyce and Wallace each portrayed thinking as an act in their fiction: Is Wallace’s portrayal of thought in Good Old Neon to be considered an evolution of, a departure from, or essentially the same as, Joyce’s portrayal of thought in Ulysses? Have we learned anything, in the past hundred or five hundred years, about the portrayal of thought and thinking?
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