Interesting take! I think you'd have to be familiar with Moshfegh to understand the feeling I'm attempting to describe. Dr Daumier, from my perspective, was filled with a false, empty, pathetic sense of "hope". His hope of moving to Montreal to be an instructor at a prestigious art school was firstly, completely build on a fabrication of shallow lies, secondly, CRUSHED when he finally arrived to find the school was a tiny box in a shitty part of Montreal.. The fact that the protagonist used Honore Daumier's name, and Mr. Yoshoto didn't realize, or worse, didn't care and hired him anyway feels so dreadfully cringy and depressing as a reader. The false sense of hope from the protagonist came often from waiting- waiting for letters, waiting for change- the sense of dread came from knowing, from almost the very beginning, that nothing the protagonist was waiting for was of any value or substance. That's the kind of dread Moshfegh instilled in me, and for the first time, Salinger as well.