Nothing Ever Happens: “Mister Squishy” and the Year of the Sentence Diagram

Hannah Smart writes about her attempt to diagram a 900-word sentence in David Foster Wallace’s “Mister Squishy,” and what the efforts taught her about human inertia and meaningless language.

By Hannah SmartNovember 15, 2025

• Fiction

• Literary Criticism

FOR THE PAST YEAR, I’ve been diagramming a 900-word sentence from David Foster Wallace’s short story “Mister Squishy,” the opener of his perplexing collection Oblivion (2004). James Wood called this story “fundamentally unreadable,” and on a purely linguistic level, it’s easy to see why—every single phrase is crammed with unnecessarily added words. A few clauses chosen at random: “The only way for an observer to detect anything unusual or out of the ordinary”; “Terry would soon be getting out of their hair and leaving them to perpend and converse in private amongst themselves”; “squeezing the absolute maximum productivity and health and self-actuation out of every last vanishing second.” These extra words feel like impediments to our understanding, but creating momentary linguistic impediments is kind of the entire point.

Wallace’s philosophy of prose is no secret. In his essay “Authority and American Usage: Or, Why ‘Politics and the English Language’ Is Redundant,” he states that “clunky redundancies” are ill-advised because they “require at least a couple extra nanoseconds of cognitive effort” for readers to parse. In “Twenty-Four Word Notes,” he recommends that writers avoid words like “utilize,” whose “extra letters and syllables” make you look “like a pompous twit,” and declares that good writing should be “clean, clear, [and] maximally considerate.” So, when one reads “Mister Squishy,” which features parodically inconsiderate and unclean phrases such as “no more facilitators to muddy the waters by impacting the tests in all the infinite ephemeral unnoticeable infinite ways human beings always kept impacting each other and muddying the waters,” one is witnessing Wallace breaking his cardinal rule. The question worth asking is why.

Despite its wordiness, there’s not much happening at the level of action in “Mr. Squishy.” The story is set during a focus group session for a Little Debbie–like company and narrated by one unnamed member, who (we learn early) is actually an infiltrator on an unspecified mission. While the narrator awaits his next instructions, which should theoretically set the story’s plot in motion, we dip repeatedly into the psyche of focus group coordinator Terry Schmidt, who muses about his utter inability to take action romantically, professionally, or personally.

While very little actually occurs in “Mister Squishy,” there’s a constant sense that something’s about to. We keep reading because we want threads to be resolved—we want to know whether Schmidt will do something to set his disappointing life in motion and how the narrator will sabotage the focus group and why a mysterious figure is scaling the outside of the building while carrying possibly hazardous equipment. But Schmidt does nothing, and the narrator’s plan is never dramatized, and the climbing figure turns out to be a mere ad campaign, after which the thread is dropped. Despite all of this, we remain engaged. Wallace keeps us constantly anticipating action in the face of unrelenting letdowns.

The key to how he manages this, I argue, lies in the grammatical structure of his “unreadable” sentences. And here’s where diagramming comes in—that skill we all learned in elementary school and that most of us forgot. The goal of a diagram is to isolate a sentence’s “essential” components—subject, verb, and object—by putting them on a horizontal line, while “excess” elements—adjectives and other modifiers, prepositional phrases, participles, and so on—go on diagonal lines that correspond with what they’re modifying. Thus, a simple sentence like “I went to the park with Jim” would be diagrammed as follows:

The sentence I’ve spent the last year diagramming, against the advice of well-meaning family and friends, is as follows:

It had occurred to Terry Schmidt that even though so many home products, from Centrum Multivitamins to Visine AC Soothing Antiallergenic Eye Drops to Nasacort AQ Prescription Nasal Spray, now came in conspicuous tamperproof packaging in the wake of the Tylenol poisonings of a decade past and Johnson & Johnson’s legendarily swift and conscientious response to the crisis—pulling every bottle of every variety of Tylenol off every retail shelf in America and spending millions on setting up overnight a smooth and hassle-free system for every Tylenol consumer to return his or her bottle for an immediate NQA refund plus an added sum for the gas and mileage or US postage involved in the return, writing off tens of millions in returns and operational costs and recouping untold exponents more in positive PR and consumer goodwill and thereby actually enhancing the brand Tylenol’s association with compassion and concern for consumer wellbeing, a strategy that had made J. & J.’s CEO and their PR vendors legends in a marketing field that Terry Schmidt had only just that year begun considering getting into as a practical and potentially creative and rewarding way to use his double major in Descriptive Statistics + Bv. Psych, the young Schmidt imagining himself in plush conference rooms not unlike this one, using the sheer force of his personality and command of the facts to persuade tablesful of hard-eyed corporate officers that legitimate concern for consumer wellbeing was both emotionally and economically Good Business, that if, e.g., R. J. Reynolds elected to be forthcoming about its products’ addictive qualities, and GM to be upfront in its national ads about the fact that vastly greater fuel efficiency was totally feasible if consumers would be willing to spend a couple hundred dollars more and settle for slightly fewer aesthetic amenities, and shampoo manufacturers to concede that the ‘Repeat’ in their product instructions was hygienically unnecessary, and Tums’ parent General Brands to spend a couple million to announce candidly that Tums-brand antacid tablets should not be used regularly for more than a couple weeks at a time because after that the stomach lining automatically started secreting more HCI to compensate for all the neutralization and made the original stomach trouble worse, that the consequent gains in corporate PR and associations of the brand with integrity and trust would more than outweigh the short-term costs and stock-price repercussions, that yes it was a risk but not a wild or dicelike risk, that it had on its side both precedent cases and demographic data as well as the solid reputation for both caginess and integrity of T. E. Schmidt & Associates, to concede that yes gentlemen he supposed he was in a way asking them to gamble some of their narrow short-term margins and equity on the humble sayso of Terence Eric Schmidt Jr., whose own character’s clear marriage of virtue, pragmatism, and oracular marketing savvy were his best and final argument; he was saying to these upper-management men in their vests and Cole Haans just what he proposed to have them say to a sorry and cynical US market: Trust Me You Will Not Be Sorry—which when he thinks of the starry-eyed puerility and narcissism of these fantasies now, a rough decade later, Schmidt experiences a kind of full-frame internal wince, that type of embarrassment-before-self that makes our most mortifying memories objects of fascination and repulsion at once, though in Terry Schmidt’s case a certain amount of introspection and psychotherapy (the latter the origin of the self-caricature doodling during downtime in his beige cubicle) had enabled him to understand that his professional fantasies were not in the main all that unique, that a large percentage of bright young men and women locate the impetus behind their career choice in the belief that they are fundamentally different from the common run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior, more as it were central, meaningful—what else could explain the fact that they themselves have been at the exact center of all they’ve experienced for the whole 20 years of their conscious lives?—and that they can and will make a difference in their chosen field simply by the fact of their unique and central presence in it…; and but so (Schmidt also still declaiming professionally to the TFG all this while) that even though so many upmarket consumer products now were tamperproof, Mister Squishy-brand snack cakes—as well as Hostess, Little Debbie, Dolly Madison, the whole soft-confection industry with its flimsy neopolymerized wrappers and cheap thin cardboard Economy Size containers—were decidedly not tamperproof at all, that it would take nothing more than one thin-gauge hypodermic and 24 infinitesimal doses of KCN, As₂O₃, ricin, C₂₁H₂₂O₂N₂, acincetilcholine, botulinus, or even merely Tl or some other aqueous base-metal compound to bring almost an entire industry down on one supplicatory knee; for even if the soft-confection manufacturers survived the initial horror and managed to recover some measure of consumer trust, the relevant products’ low price was an essential part of their established Market Appeal Matrix, and the costs of reinforcing the Economy packaging or rendering the individual snack cakes visibly invulnerable to a thin-gauge hypodermic would push the products out so far right on the demand curve that mass-market snacks would become economically and emotionally untenable, corporate soft confections going thus the way of hitchhiking, unsupervised trick-or-treating, door-to-door sales, & c.

When I started my diagram, I immediately recognized that the standard tools, like Let’s Diagram, wouldn’t work due to the sentence’s sheer size and scope, so I ended up using Microsoft Word’s notoriously finicky shape and text-box features. I lost count of how many times I highlighted a selection of components only to accidentally unhighlight them all. After a while, I began screenshotting larger chunks of the sentence and assembling those chunks as images in a separate document. The process felt as slow and daunting and never-ending as the sentence itself.

However, once the diagram started to take shape, some truths became evident, the main one being how few words go on the horizontal line representing core components. The sentence’s foundation is a simple phrase: “It had occurred.” But in order to find out what has occurred, we must parse clauses within clauses within clauses, none of which resolve themselves—instead, they get bogged down by more modifiers and subclauses (visible in the diagram as a cascade of diagonal lines). The effect, for readers, is that we feel constantly suspended on the brink of grammatical satisfaction whose denial Wallace disguises as mere postponement. Every time we sense that he’s about to complete a thought, he introduces a new thought that must now also be completed before we can get back to the original topic.

The original topic—that is, the sentence stripped down to only what’s relevant—is as follows:

It had occurred to Terry Schmidt that even though so many upmarket consumer products now were tamperproof, Mister Squishy-brand snack cakes were not, that it would take nothing more than one thin-gauge hypodermic and some aqueous base-metal compound to bring an entire industry down on one supplicatory knee, for the products’ low price was an essential part of their Market Appeal Matrix, and the costs of reinforcing the Economy packaging would become untenable.

In even fewer words: Terry Schmidt, so desperate for something to happen in his life that a poisoning scandal is preferable to stagnant nothingness, is fantasizing about tainting a batch of snack cakes. He’s envisioning himself as the protagonist of his own story—the hero (or villain) who finally spurs some kind of change. But while this fantasy takes up much page space, it, like everything else in the story, never comes to fruition.

What Wallace does, here and throughout “Mister Squishy,” is perpetually suggest to readers that something will happen if we simply sift through enough meaningless data, but the gratification we’re promised never arrives. Thus, the data-sifting becomes our whole purpose—we become like Terry Schmidt, whose ultimate job, we’re told, is “not to provide information or even a statistical approximation of information but […] a cascade of random noise meant to so befuddle the firm and its Client that no one would feel anything but relief at the decision to proceed.” The central meaninglessness of Schmidt’s job induces a frustration at his own inability to “make a difference”—a sense of “terrible and thoroughgoing smallness”—and reading “Mister Squishy” forces us to experience this smallness as well.

¤

The grammatical depiction of stasis in “Mister Squishy” is the main reason why the story so resonates with me. When I began my sentence diagram, I felt stuck, life trajectory–wise. I was trying to be a writer and attending grad school so that I didn’t have to admit to nosy peers that I was trying to be a writer. With every publication came the hope that greater readership, greater sway with agents, and (most importantly) a greater sense of fulfillment were fast approaching, so when the fulfillment didn’t come, my instinct was to blame the entire literary industry. It was the lit mags’ fault for leaving my submissions “in progress” for a year, publishers’ fault for prioritizing marketability over artistry, and everyone’s fault for failing to see my unique and generational talent. Unlike Schmidt, I never considered poisoning anyone, but I sympathized with his abstract desire to burn it all down—to force the industry to start from scratch, ideally with an ethos that aligned with mine, thus putting an end to my persistent sense that my life was headed nowhere.

I doubt I’m alone in this sense—it’s the feeling that pervades the popular internet meme Nothing Ever Happens, and it derives, in large part, from the deceptively meaningless rhetoric we’re all fed on social media and in popular culture and by the current US president. In fact, when I force myself to listen to Donald Trump’s speeches, which are full of phrases like “I have concepts of a plan” and “We’ve stopped their crusade on coal. […] Clean, beautiful coal. I said you’re not allowed to use the word ‘coal’ unless you say ‘clean, beautiful coal,’” I’m reminded of that empty monster sentence from “Mister Squishy.” The story has a lot to teach us about the way language can simultaneously herald and forestall progress.

There’s something even more insidious about this particular brand of bullshit: through its promise of change that it can’t actualize, it becomes a tool for getting us to accept dissatisfaction. Perhaps a better word than accept is endure. We cope with the dissatisfaction by fantasizing about progress. In “Mister Squishy,” we see this tendency in Schmidt, who, even after realizing that he’ll never “make a difference,” continues to work the same job for the same company and dream of an alternate reality in which he derives actual gratification from that job. In real life, we see it in the “news” headlines that populate our feeds, many of which purport to provide updates but really only guarantee more of the same. “Elon Musk Shares Vision of Mars as ‘Life Insurance’ For Humanity,” for example, discusses the potential benefits of a hypothetical Mars trip but doesn’t indicate meaningful steps toward that end. Pop culture essays like “Disney Just Removed the Rey Sequel’s Release Date,” with its qualifier “But the last Skywalker will still return,” reassure readers that despite some unforeseen upsets, everything will proceed more or less as expected—that, in other words, things are happening. Yet for the average American living in 2025, that isn’t our experience. We have access to more information than ever, but most of it merely repackages the essential inertia of human existence in fancy, roundabout language. And as the quantity of extant data continues to grow, the meaning-making required for us to feel like our lives and the world around us have some kind of forward narrative trajectory will become more difficult. We are entering a new nihilist era.

Wallace identified this trend early. In his essay “Deciderization 2007,” he claimed that “whatever our founders and framers thought of as a literate, informed citizenry can no longer exist, at least not without a whole new modern degree of subcontracting and dependence packed into what we mean by ‘informed.’” In other words, it’s becoming harder to find meaning in the world around us, not in spite of all the information we have access to but because of it. Wallace’s central concerns—the vapid rhetoric surrounding Iraq, the growing epidemic of TV-news-as-entertainment, and the reelection of George W. Bush—differ from ours. Yet the core problem he identified—that, for the first time in human history, we have access to more information than we can ever process and that much of that information is misleading or fatuous or flat-out wrong—has only worsened.

I won’t pretend to offer a solution. Instead, I’ll keep returning to “Mister Squishy,” whose grammatical structure is a striking depiction of language’s power to lull us into complacency. Reading the story—parsing the meaning of each meaningless clause—has taught me to distinguish between data and knowledge, to approach all inputs with not just narrative but also linguistic skepticism, and to stop conceptualizing my life solely in future terms. After all, the future is eternal, while the present is momentary.

(And I’m still not done with the diagram. I don’t know if I ever will be.)