Montaigne/Austen Essay

   The famous author David Foster Wallace once wrote in a 2001 story, "What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant." What Wallace is trying to get across to his readers is that our minds think way too fast for our hearts to express in feelings. It's like the cliché saying where "your mind is telling you no, but your body is telling you yeah." It's super complicated to express how you feel to someone or about a certain thing when there's so much that goes on in your mind and you can't even understand yourself. The book The Complete Essays by Michael de Montaigne negates Wallace's whole idea in his 2001 story.

   Wallace talks about certain things and their importances. Montaigne talks about things like people's imagination. Very popular in his works, Montaigne uses a strategy called "stream of consciousness." This strategy depicts the thoughts and feelings of the characters, and even the readers, that keeps the story at a constant flow. While reading Montaigne's books, you can tell he is filled with intelligence because he makes these very rare connections with certain subjects. Montaigne talks about his own experiences. This fills his work with interest and individualism. 

   In the book, The Complete Essays, Montaigne goes from topic to topic, covering a load of topics and feeding the reader with bits and bits of information. This is where stream of consciousness comes in. This novel was supposed to be an organized piece of information that promoted his beliefs. It ended up being a piece that went on and on with all he had to say. It pretty much flowed on (stream of consciousness). There were a lot of allusions from different types of foreign literature (Greek, Latin) that helped back up a lot of his ongoing stories. All of these writing in this books contradict Wallace's technicallity and brings out the ideas of peoples. 

   Jane Austen's writings are very similar to Montaigne's. Like Montaigne, Austen used stream of consciousness to keep the story flowing in Pride and Prejudice. She and Montaigne were very likely to depict the thoughts of characters to interest the reader. This was the opposite of Montaigne. Wallace was very technical with his thoughts. 

   Wallace figured that you couldn't go into deep thought and express those feelings according to the 2001 quote. Both Austen and Montaigne contradicted his sayings with their writings by using stream of consciousness. They grabbed the reader's attention and were able to talk about one's feelings. While Wallace was technical about not being able to express your feelings to others and better yet yourself.