Did John Wayne died?

Why the fuck did Orin want to bang Steeply

Toothbrush theory is good and prob "true", but the missing stash is indication enough for me that Hal was involved since he was the only one who knew about it other than Pemulis (and the wraith if you believe this love story is a ghost story). And he may have been trying to save Pemulis with the stash grab which redeems Hal (not that he really needs it).

Sexuality is a spectrum user, also Steeply had hella charisma in his own right
Pemulis was expelled because Avril is a genius classist and he gave her an opening when he committed several felonies. He probably kept at tennis and lived well though, unless that late AA chapter was about him.

Also Hal is not a fucking bene gesserit, his body didn't synthesize a complex molecule 16 years after contact with a toxin.

I don't think that Hal synthesized it either. I thought that theory was crazy too.

Is Marathe a total cunt for giving Gompert access to the entertainment?

Gompert is a literally who in the narrative and its DFW that is the total cunt for naming her after someone he knew and then using her as a classic AA "the disease is out to get you the second you relapse" pathetic character.

It was a kindness. She wanted pretty desperately to get out of the wing.
Shame she had a flat ass and was a lousy lay though, I always imagined her as my ex gf

Why was Lyle a wraith? He never dies, or does he?

...

Does anyone think Hal may have seen the entertainment?

I buy this more than the wraith toothpaste shit.

Also, Madame Psychosis really is deformed right? Orin wouldn't have left her otherwise, and especially not if she had gotten even more PGOAT

How could they dig up Himself's head if he blew it up in a microwave?

They like made a plastic head for him. Either that or his brains blew out his eyes and his skull was still intact.

there are some interesting theories that he actually blew up his head to try to destroy the entertainment, because in the scene where JOI is posing as the conversationalist to get Hal to talk he says something about the Entertainment embedded inside of your father's head. And that scene was way in the past.

Who really knows though. As other people have said all ambiguity is definitely intentional, DFW anticipated most possible theories people posit about the unresolved plot points in IJ I'd imagine

I don't know why you don't buy the wraith toothpaste shit. It's a little hard to spot but it seems fairly reasonable. Who else would have found the DMZ that was stashed in the ceiling? We know Pemulis lost it. Why else would there be all of that emphasis on Hal being unable to control his emotions towards the end of the book? The wraith is already known to be using the toothbrushes, and there's that scene with the toothbrushes and Gately in the first hundred pages (the first pages of IJ is full of hints for the ending).

Hes not explicitly named in the scene, but there's a small section about someone (almost certainly Lyle) being trapped in a sauna at ETA and dying. You sweat in saunas. Lyle "eats" sweat. The scene is towards the end. Not sure where. Too lazy to look it up. Last 150 pages though. I missed it my first time through.

Also, can anyone give me the scene/page number of Gompert getting the entertainment/watching it? Don't remember that. But it's been over a year since I read it. Also, someone here once said she was connected to John Wayne somehow. Was that the case? Again, it's been a while. Thanks in advance.

That wasn't Lyle.

Marathe presumably shows Gompert the entertainment after they are drinking in the bar. Kate is missing after that time.
That scene is before he even made the entertainment.

JOI’s wraith is responsible for the strange disturbances around ETA — tripods in the forest, moving Ortho’s bed, ceiling tiles on the floor. He knocks the ceiling tiles down in an attempt to find the DMZ. Pemulis is too distracted with getting expelled to have Hal take it, so JOI needs to get it to Hal some other way.

JOI also created DMZ as part of an attempt to undo the effects of Hal’s eating mold as a child (recall: DMZ is a mold that grows on a mold). He left it along with the Entertainment (recall: ETA kids find JOI’s personal effects (670: “a bulky old doorless microwave…a load of old TP cartridges…mostly unlabelled”); the tapes and the DMZ are delivered together to the FLQ) which is about this goal (it stars a woman named Madame Psychosis (a street name for DMZ) explaining that the thing that killed you in your last life will give birth to you in the next). The DMZ and the Entertainment were meant to go together for Hal. Now that the Entertainment has escaped, he needs to get Hal the DMZ.

What a good dad.
Unlike Pemulis's

he made and remade IJ over and over again, from whenever Hal stopped being able to connect. It was made to draw him out. It's reasonable to assert that JOI could have had an early version of the entertainment (IJ I or II, idk the timeline for this) embedded in his head in this scene

>Did Orin fuck his mum?
can I get a quick rundown?

Madam psychosis is Metempsychosis

WOWOOOAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

She seemed to fuck everyone else. And there's a bit where Joelle ponders the possible sexual element to Orin and Avril's relationship (at least i think it was Joelle. Maybe it was someone else)

is Harold Bloom justified in thinking IJ is a bad book?
I don't think it's a bad book. Sure it's not flowery in an aesthetic artsy kind of way (at least most of it) but it serves some pretty perspectives on addiction and depression. The section about all the things you learn of in a rehab or whatever I found was very literary and beautiful. I guess it takes a certain amount of sincerity to enjoy this book. Sad being that lit is ironic as fuck about it

want some links baby?

jstor.org/stable/pdf/20107209.pdf

(you need jstor access)

Because he's into MILFs and steeply was a highly passable trap

>highly passable trap
Mega kek. I only ask because Steeply was anything but passable.

> Madame Psychosis really is deformed right?
Yea, it's not like a meme where she feels deformed, she actually had a vial of acid thrown in her face. But her vocaroo's are still heavenly.

if she didn't, she really, really wanted to

Definitely took the D from Bain and pretended it was O, though.

Took the D from everyone. Including Tavis, who is probably Mario's biological father.

I wonder how many students she fucked, aside from Wayne. Maybe she despises Pemulis so because he rejected her.
Also, I'm surprised that Pemulis can't blackmail her in some way with this.
Also
>probably
It all adds up.

He also seems to have a strange relationship with women possibly as a result of sexual abuse

Possibly, i thought it was also implied that he watched the porno that JOI had that heart to heart about with him, which skewed his view of intercourse and what it means.

I feel like Orin's too smart for that and it would also explain him resenting Avril

>which skewed his view of intercourse and what it means.
Himself encourages to wait until after he has had sex and felt a transcendental experience of some such. Or wait until he has had sex I don't remember. Orin was 15 at the time, and found it amusing his father thought he was still a virgin.
I think Orin had the problem long before this.
There are two more obvious ways of looking at this. One is just DFW inserting another form of addiction, and the other suggests that there was indeed some form of sexual abuse. I'd say both are probably true.

Harold Bloom just hates DFW because one of the IJ footnotes calls him turgid.

>guess it takes a certain amount of sincerity to enjoy this book

legit gagged

it's said she fucks everything with a Y chromosome
she has John Wayne dress up as a football player while she dresses up as a cheerleader, and Orin is a football player and Joelle is a cheerleader
Orin basically hates Avril, although this can be read as resentment for making Himself kill himself.

It's a dark joke. Orin is a latent homosexual, the Don Juan type. DFW was lifting stuff straight from Freud and standard quack psychology:

>Orin likes football (which DFW at one point in the book, through the mouthpiece of Orin's friend, comically lambasts as a very homoerotic sport) >like the standard womanizer according to psychology, he only womanizes so much to prove he is a man/that he isn't gay
>he also does this in an attempt to fuck his own mother, who he is overly attached to b/c he never got enough actual maternal love from her
>but mixed with this is also a lack of close contact with his father and desire for masculine contact, a father figure, which makes him a latent homosexual
>i don't fucking know

Also IMO DFW created deliberately ambiguous plot points in the novel to frustrate the reader's desire for entertainment/plot/total understanding, although some stuff is probably meant to be true (the ghost doing shit like >JOI’s wraith is responsible for the strange disturbances around ETA — tripods in the forest, moving Ortho’s bed, ceiling tiles on the floor)

Or, a brief overview:
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Juanism

The conversationalist is his dad in disguise. Himself doesn't have the entertainment in his head, it was the anti-entertainment

Can someone provide the textual evidence for Orin banging The Moms. I don't remember anything other than nebulous, circumstantial hintings (e.g. John Wayne in a football uniform, etc.).

I am slightly skeptical that they actually did cause Orin is actively sending out Ent. copies to people that The Moms cheated on Himself with and ruined the relationship (cf. The medical attache), it seems bizzare that Orin would be that hypocritical to kill people who split up his parents if he had doen so himself

There is a particular passage within the novel where Himself stumbles upon Avril fucking someone in the car, and the name she had written in the foggy windows drove him to his final breakdown.

It's heavily implied she was fucking Orin. Anyway, even if you don't think she actually did fuck Orin, there is multiple instances in the book that points towards a mutual incestual attraction.

No, the guy in the hospital sees her face, feels affected by it, and decides to help her. She must be incredibly beautiful for that to have happened.

Also, MP doesn't strike me as a pathological liar or joker or in some sad way deluded. I feel she's being serious when she tells Gately that she's actually incredibly beautiful.

The point is that there's no functionally no difference between being incredibly deformed and incredibly beautiful in a society where everything is about spectacle, performance, entertainment. BOTH of them will compel to pay attention to you, be interested in you, fascinated.

Both of them are burdens (the thing about very attractive women is that they eventually learn to be almost unconsciously cruel, because they're used to people liking them only for their looks, and even begin to hate all the attention they get just for their looks, and also develop very high standards to boot).

Cf. JOI's Medusa v. the Odalisque

There's a part in the book where it says Orin had only ever loved one woman. I think pretty certainly this refers to his Mom rather than J.venereal.disease.
I just don't think Orin would have left her if she wasn't ugly. It's cute and obvious the point about being really hideous or really beautiful, but it's useful to go by Orin. Orin loses interest in PGOAT because she stops being "restaurant-silencing" beautiful, losing a similarity she had with his mom.

OK, but I'm confused as to what this points to about her intentions in telling Gately that she's incredibly beautiful.

Also about the hospital attendant who is affected by her face and decides to help her.

Also, an incredibly beautiful woman wearing a veil to cover up the fact that her face is too beautiful, and an acid that makes a beautiful woman even more beautiful seems to me a very DFW-esque trope.

Thank you for finding my trite analysis cute.

Makes sense. How does this relate to the transfixation when watching the Entertainment? Simply the idea that being constantly entertained isn't being entertained at all?

>OK, but I'm confused as to what this points to about her intentions in telling Gately that she's incredibly beautiful.
The whole thing is laden with ambiguity. I don't have a problem taking it either way until we think about why Orin leaves.
>the hospital attendant helps her
Again we're mired in ambiguity, could be for either reason.

There's that part toward the end where she says she was close to removing the veil to get away from Steeply, another nod to Medusa v Odalisque.

She tells Don G she's incredibly beautiful either because, she was, the acid made her even more so, or she's hiding still and uncomfortable.
She still hasn't shown anyone under the vale since Orin. No one. There's a lot of stuff like this in the book about the UHID:

>“In other words you hide your hiding… U.H.I.D. allows members to be open about their essential need for concealment. In other words we don the veil. We don the veil and wear the veil proudly and stand very straight and walk briskly wherever we wish, veiled and hidden, but now completely up-front and unashamed about the fact that how we appear to others affects us deeply, about the fact that we want to be shielded from all sight. U.H.I.D. supports us in our decision to hide openly.” (535)

But really I'm not sure there's evidence to declare either way that she's deformed or very beautiful.
I think our only real look into this is through Orin's leaving her.

the most interesting question w/r/t the Entertainment is how a purely Entertained life could be bad. Intuitively, I think we say that it is, but I can't see any way in which if you're offered pure happiness you shouldn't take it. The book kind of brings this up with "IL NE FAUT PLUS QU'ON PURSUIVE LE BONHEUR" printed on the cartridge; all we do in life is pursue a happiness but once we find it does it really mean anything?

lmao I don't know man

DFW creates a strange psychocosmology (a strange word but I think it fits) in the book where "the woman who kills you in this world gives birth to you in the next". The next = reincarnation = metempsychosis = Madame Psychosis.

The movie (IJ) is supposedly done with some strange lens effect so it resembles what an infant would see when looking out at the world (apparently their eyes are different from ours, who knew). And the movie shows a naked MP (iirc) looking down at the viewer (as if they're an infant in the crib) and saying "I am so sorry" over and over again.

MP is both your mother and the the woman who killed you in the past life. This ties into the Oedipus complex (wanting to bang your mother, or at the very least the infantile desire to go back into the womb/be protected by your mother), the obsession in the book with rings/circles/"annularity" (you get killed by a lady and she gives birth to you), and mysticism (the more we are attached to sex/life, the more we partake of death and die).

The woman is saying sorry for killing you, and sorry for giving birth to you --- sorry for bringing you into this painful world.

Apparently, all of this is incredibly seductive to the viewer.

DFW equates being constantly entertained with being reverted to an infant, being trapped in a never-ending cycle of death and life, kind of like Buddhism or Hinduism.

cf. Hindu image of the woman goddess who at one moment is beautiful and gives birth to a child, at the next instant is terrifying and eats/kills her own child (I think Joseph Campbell mentions it).

>And the movie shows a naked MP (iirc)
She's donning the veil and pregnant in this scene, which is just confusing really, I know Molly Notkin says this must be an fx because Notkin and seen her naked (still veiled) and you can always tell when a woman has been pregnant (a footnote says this is total bullshit).

This kinda brings up something interesting I haven't thought about a whole lot.

Another thing, PGOAT says she was only in the entertainment for two scenes. Do you think that's all there was of the film? Her through the revolving door and her apologizing nude, visibly pregnant, and veiled?

I think it's more likely that it was the Medical Attache or CT. I'm not convinced that Orin banged the Moms

I also (vaguely) remember a quote where JVD tells someone that she is so beautiful that it's a functional deformity.

It's really hard to say, she fucked everyone. Orin was always fucking her metaphorically anyway.

I like how so many characters fit accordingly to Hamlet.
I like Hamlet.
I want some hash browns.

can some1 explain the hamlet comparisons beyond Hal = Hamlet JOI = King Hamlet? I am a pleb

This Orin/Moms incest meme is retarded. There's no evidence in the text, and people who think this are projecting.

>people who think this are projecting.
You should really understand the words before you use them :/

The text is fucking rife with sexual tension between O and the Moms. Plenty of reasonable cause for the discussion.

There's lots of small shit.

The first line of Hamlet begins with "Who's there?", IJ with "I am"
Himselfs movie company is Poor Yorrick Entertainment, Yorrick being Hamelt's childhood jester
Etc.

For some bigger/thematic shit there are more connections

I.e. the haunting by a ghost (Hamelt)/wraith (IJ)

CT bangs Hal's mom and takes over as head of ETA as well.

So what happened to Pemulis?

>you will never live an idyllic life at a tennis school

Did Hal see Infinite Jest (V or VI)?
He got expelled for not letting Mrs. Inc suck his dong.
He would have been fine though, dude was wicked smaht.

Yeah I think Hal watched it and destroyed the DMT and Pemulis's chance at fucking up his own future.

Actually, ya. Since Himself's wraith was going about hanky panky all over ETA, he certainly may have.
Firstly you would argue that Hal would have seen and known all the cartridges, and he asks for a specific one. But their is one that should read Friend, but reads "Fiend" - Hal discards any irregularity to natural wear. I'm not sure if this is to both signal Pemulis and indicate that ghosts have kinda poor labeling or not, but it seems reasonable to posit that the mislabeled entertainment is in fact "the" entertainment.
But why would himself want that, just as antidote? Is that also the reason people give for the DMZ toothbrush theory?

He dead

thread is dead but i have a question about one of the earlier passages. It's the one with the man waiting for a woman to drop off a load of weed round his house and he's all paranoid. Who was this and was it relevant? There's also a similar passage towards the end with a monologue in AlAnon from a guy who goes to see his son and he's calling his sister 'The Cunt'. Was the prior Hal in the future?

The scene that recounts the events leading up to the acid getting thrown in her face is deliberately ambiguous.

Am I the only one that thinks Hal just said "fuck it" an took the DMZ on his own accord?

guy in first chapter is ken erdeddy and the guy you're thinking of from the second chapter is pemulis's dad trying to see the peemster himself.

ahhh thanks, I thought the second one might of been to do with pemulis.

would love to play a game of Eschaton

>pemulis's dad trying to see the peemster himself.
I'm confused. Didn't his dad rape his brother? What happened to Matty Pemulis in these scenes then?

Nevermind, I'm retarded. I forgot they both can be called Pemulis.

lol
i hope so

It has plenty of interesting and even humourous situations but the composition is incredibly sloppy and the themes are ham fisted as hell

Bump

More interestingly, is the girl who gets E the weed Molly Notkin?
And does Notkin, not-kin have any significance?
Someone in this thread said it might be Pemulis. I'm not sure who that was, anyone have any ideas?

>Pemulis
the way he spoke wasn't like pemulis or pemulis's dad, it was very 'Boston' though. whenever pemulis speaks it isn't written out like this and his father's speech is extremely Irish (see the passage about him raping matty). I really have no clue who it might of been.

After reading about DFW's background with analytic philosophy, I've come to think that he came across Robert Nozick's thought experiment 'the experience machine.' I think there's a bunch of analytic philosophy papers discussing that question you raise. Try searching for, as I mentioned, 'Robert Nozick', 'experience machine', and/or 'ethical hedonism'.

Thanks, this is really interesting. It's been my worldview that humans only exist in relation to other humans and this is an interesting way to argue that