Thread For People Who Have Actually Read INFINITE JEST

Clearly you never did the Kenosha Kid

True, but he was forced to by the AFR. Recall the scene where he is tortured by cockroaches in the big glass cup. He is just a tool of the AFR.

he was doing that before they caught up with him

>everything come together
>halfway

Bruh

no, he was just sending it out to people he didn't liike.
The AFR had it mass-distributed.

also you could argue that Orin was under his father's influence when we was seeking revenge. so there's that. (not that it's really saying much)

Meant to say it's starting to come together.

spoilers: it never really does.
the big pay-off is almost like an off-screen event and the story doesn't really end.
the finale of teh sopranos clearly copied the idea, a reference even being thrown into TPK with Toni Ware's mom's death (being so similar to how tony kills Chrissy). It's complicated

because the true swartchgarrat must go to the moon and never return

I honestly think it's right up there with those novels, not to mention the fact that underworld is a pretty simple and incomparable book to GR other than the whole "muh pomo" thing

Blaming Troeltsch is just babytown. Really, juvenile reading.

>not realizing the AFR and Orin are just puppets in the hands of Troeltsch who is trying to bring the overall quality of sports journalism down via a complex, devilish plan to become the undisputed GOAT of commentating

did you even read the book mang?

"Help wanted"

>the novel's discussion centers entirely around understanding the plot that was too poorly written to follow

You guys really want to like this book, huh

That was hilarious. I gigglekekked for a minute.
People have questions first about such things. Then you get to the rest after. You're ten posts in. Ease up.

I'm reading "Every Love Story is a Ghost Story" and it sort of bothers me how much of IJ is just straight non-fiction. Really makes his holding up of Don Gately even less interesting.

i just finished it for the first time last night and it was honestly unironically the best book ive ever read. dont put too much faith on anything coming together though

Bear with me guys, it's been almost ten years since I last read it.

I liked the book but what was up with that random "black slang" chapter in the beginning? I don't remember it having any significance on the story and it almost put me off the book altogether

that part also threw me off. i have no idea about its relevance.
another part that threw me off was at the very end, the speaker at an AA meeting talking about not being allowed to see his kid. There was only like 20 pages left and i was just thinking "stop now! youre not gonna have enough time to wrap up the plot!"
little did i know...

also no one has posted this pic yet and i feel its necessary to a DFW thread

To be perfectly honest, I don't think Wittgenstein would be good on Jeopardy

It's something that should have been cut. Wallace literally only put it in because at the end of the process he realized that there weren't any black perspectives in the book.

Ya i have this question as well. In a thread some weeks ago, an user asked if that was Pemulis future.
Definitely not, but I'm not sure what it is. It can't be just another "dude addiction lmao" example so late in the book.

well he really nailed it with that part

I remember being very off-put by it because it's not even how black Americans actually talk
I live in Atlanta and you can absolutely tell when somebody's making fun of the dialect and when somebody actually understands it because it's very internally consistent

troeltsch is probably unironically my favorite character. the guy was pure gold in every scene.

Everyone knows that, except Dave of course

did you read the beginning again?
do you guys remember the chapter where someone is talking about a movie where all the characters' conversations are given equal volume and no one is given priority? i think that's what dfw was doing with all the seemingly random characters. he was giving them each equal importance in the book.

What a brain blast dude

where did you guys read all the parts that happened in year of glad?
all i can find are the first couple chapters with hal in arizona and the locker room. other than that there's the scene at the end where gately dreams of people digging up Himself's head and the mastercopy is already gone and orin is trapped by the AFR in a glass box.
i think i missed a few chapters somewhere.

So what is not in there

> giving it to just a few people
> it totally won't end up in the hands of others.

i read someone's comment on that saying that it was supposed to be someone that is mentally disabled rather than a black person. it never mentions that they are black.

Someone should have said that to Sean Pratt

i live in NJ, right next to Newark and my high school was 60% black and i can promise you that is EXACTLY what black people speak like

ok, now im going to go read the beginning again. thanks... for sucking me into reading the whole thing all over again (im okay with it)

Can confirm. I live in Nunavut and all the black people here talk like this. Dave had his finger on the pulse of the African American community.

>He truly was an infinite Jester
Kill yourself and maybe in your next life you'll have decent taste

Sorry user but Underworld isn't anywhere near as good as IJ
White Noise is better, but still lower tier imo. DeLillo is among the best on a sentence to sentence basis, but the ideas are simple and repetitive. I took a lot more from Wallace's work. He's not Pynchon, but he's the closest we'll see for a long, long time.

What does a book making another book obsolete entail?

Putting too much emphasis on the plot of the novel
Missing the behind the novel

Behind*
Also, the novel is open ended and can be deconstructed so many different ways. The contrast between Hall and Don Gately is imo the skeleton behind IJ.

>Missing the behind the novel
There's nothing to miss. If you've been alive for the last ten years IJ is an unseasoned meal. The only thing to even bother talking about is the plot.
And again, thanks for nothing.

maaaan i read this book and enjoyed every page of it, but i missed something, something big obviously

the last scenes in the novel are the afr coming into the school (i imagine theyre there to kill hal or at least capture him and get a hold of the pgoat somehow) and don overdosing (but i thought this was a flashback to when he was a druggie, no?)

also, what happened when john wayne sperg'd out? did he somehow get dmz'd? was it on purpose or accidental? was he an afr agent? how do you know this?

when do you find out that orin digged up the tape? and when were orin/hal/pgoat/don all together to dig it up?

was the wriath JOI? i literally dont understand the relationship JOI's supposed ghost-presence has in this book as ive read in some synopsis' as i was under the assumption that this was a fairly realistic novel

can some explain to me the capital-T Truth to this brainlet
what the fuck did i miss

bumping for this as well.
from what i read the afr didnt capture or kill hal. if you read the beginning again, he's in arizona talking to the school deans and he starts having communication problems(shrieking and shit). then they stuff him in the locker room and he gets sent to the ER.
during this he recounts how he helped don gately dig up JOI's head and they didnt find the master copy.

during the end of the book gately has a dream of PGOAT, hal, john wayne and him digging up JOI's head.

john wayne recovered after being sent to some kind of psych hospital, the same one hal got sent to after JOI died i believe.

JOI was a wraith, as well as lyle(the kid who can levitate. yeah apparently he can become a wraith as well). i dont know why this happened but it did.

im sure im missing more so if someone else can fill in the holes like how orin got the mastercopy that would be great.

thanks
>from what i read the afr didnt capture or kill hal. if you read the beginning again, he's in arizona talking to the school deans and he starts having communication problems(shrieking and shit). then they stuff him in the locker room and he gets sent to the ER.

yes, i realise this is after when the afr came into eta, but i thought this reaction was a personality-thing, i.e. hal was too scared of 'growing up' as he's looking for unis to attend because he couldnt make it into the 'show' (but he didnt really want to in the first place) and as stated in the book, playing uni tennis, is basically a dead end and you may as well just kys at that point

>during this he recounts how he helped don gately dig up JOI's head and they didnt find the master copy.
looks like i missed this part; will have to re-read

>JOI was a wraith, as well as lyle(the kid who can levitate. yeah apparently he can become a wraith as well). i dont know why this happened but it did.
i guess i just have to accept the supernatural parts of the book; i thought the supernatural parts were hallucinations or something.

thanks. so i guess i also want to understand john wayne's relationship with the afr, and if the afr ever got hold of the master copy and if they did, did they distribute it to destroy society or what

>I remember being very off-put by it because it's not even how black Americans actually talk

i live in africa and i can confirm its EXACTLY how african-africans talk

>looks like i missed this part; will have to re-read
Well, you won't have to get too far.

yeah there's also all the stuff with The Darkness's bed being stuck to the ceiling and moving around the ETA. also the broomsticks help onto the wall and the tomato in The Darkness's bowl when he's eating lunch after the match with hal.
i think it's implied that JOI or Lyle is messing with stice for some reason.

>i dont know why this happened but it did.

all of the "supernatural" stuff is an attempt at surrealism, same with the levitating characters in TPK. DFW had a softspot for this kind of stuff

it would be supernatural if it was questioned extensively

puts thing all together if i look at it this way

i thought all those antics pemulis' and co.'s doing, but never explained by the author as i figured it was implied (for a few reasons mostly that 'kids will be kids') and never really considered a supernatural element to the novel

It was a POV of someone who knew one of the blacks from the halfway house, so when she shows up several hunderd pages later you have some context on her. If you remember her name.

Guys im at 800 something and holy shit this book is gold.

what do you think of Wallace's dissection of depression? Do you agree that depression falls into two buckets, anhedonia and "It"?

One of my favorite scenes was Tony Nwangi, a lesser character, prorector, barking during drills around p459, to ignore the conditions in which one performs.

"Is no cold. Is no wind. No cold wind where you occur. No? Not "adjust to conditions." Make this second world inside the world: here there are no conditions."

Later on,pg461:

Hal, responding to Schtitt:
'The human head, sir, if i got your thrust. Where I'm going to occur as a player. The game's two heads' one world. One world, sir.'

I'm about 1/3 of the way through Underworld right now, and it's not really scratching the itch like IJ. I've heard a lot of good things about it though, so I'm going to finish it.

>two buckets
>anhedonia and "It"

I thought he was calling anhedonia "it", because it's the only way Kate Gompert knew how to identify, not seperating the two?

Orin is trapped in an upside down glass like he did to the cockroaches in his shower.

It also mentions the Punk guy that crashes Gately and Fax's binge towards the end of the novel.

I also love the part where one of the prorectors is talking about holding in an iffy fart during a match.

>troeltsch commentating into his hand
that part was great.
honestly i feel really bad for pemulis most of all. i dont know why he's so likable.

Not Matty.

the matty as a kid part was probably the most disturbing passage ive ever read

made me question what kind of person dfw really is to put those descriptions into words

Earlier on someone says that Pemulis could get into any school he wants on test scores alone. That and he's a pretty good tennis player who could easily get a full ride the way Orin did before he switched to football. He's a similar caliber player.

We're still here.

He obviously didn't experience every single thing he writes about. He just had a dark mind to come up with some of this shit.

Kek. What a softie.
I was jerking off while reading how that one father was fucking he's paraplegic mute daughter in a Raquel Welch mask, then left the mask on her and her covered in his cum, and the foster daughter had to watch and clean her up.

Why would Hal's dad make a film about a graphic, homoerotic sex scene?

It basically tells you why. Just reread that part.

well obviously, that isnt what i was implying

oh yeah
that scene was fucked up

for some reason i found the matty one the worst of all (maybe because i have a younger brother and like matty/mike, as kids, we shared the same bedroom, so in a way, it was sort of relatable)

The foster daughter shared a room with the Raquel Welch doll.
There's also this part but it's easy to just find that incredibly funny

There's plenty of bad ones, like the chick that holds on to her dead baby for a bit too long. Maybe the Pemulis one just hit harder because even though his character is well-developed, you just know him as this confident chad at this point in the book.

didnt matty & mike as well?

maybe i mixed it up; its been a while since ive read the book

followup questions:

can we track the tape a little more percisely? and why did it end up in the same movie shop that pemulis bought the superacid from?

who was that figure outside in the snow near the end of the book, out by the bleachers I think

is there a "fourth" brother in the same way we're sort of pushed into the Karamazov metaphor near the end?

Why does madame psychosis sound like metempychosis

No, you're thinking of a different child rape scene

>Why does madame psychosis sound like metempychosis
You can't be serious

>Underworld
lmao bruh
I'm no DFW stooge and even I think IJ is leagues better

>and why did it end up in the same movie shop that pemulis bought the superacid from

damn good question. Maybe Orin had something to do with it? Or maybe DFW justs didn't want to bother with the explanation

>
is there a "fourth" brother in the same way we're sort of pushed into the Karamazov metaphor near the end?

sounds like nonsense to me bro

For a while I thought that it was unambiguous whether or not PGOAT was really hideously deformed or extremely, can't-look-away, restaurant quieting beautiful. One could argue that it's the same but for the sake of talking about it not like fucking faggots, deformed here should just mean "wince-worthy".
For a while I thought it was for certain that she was ugly because Orin left her, but I could persuade myself Orin is fucked up enough to leave for other reasons.
But the whole ordeal is very simple in a way. JOI tapes her unveiled. People can't stop watching, and you don't look at something hideous and ugly and deformed in the way the "it was like watching a car accident" cliches go. She was Medusa, not the odalisque.

it's probably nonsense, but there are a good amoung of parallels between the two either way:

jstor.org/stable/pdf/40755487.pdf

>is there a "fourth" brother in the same way we're sort of pushed into the Karamazov metaphor near the end?
>sounds like nonsense to me bro
Actually that's a good question (not that poster) and I never thought of it before.

Smerdyakov is the semi-official 4th brother of the Karamazovs, often forgotten when talking of them because he is illegitimate and doesn't have the Karamazov name. Who's the Smerdyakov of Infinite Jest (where DFW really does push the TBK-similarities, with Orin = Dmitri, Hal = Ivan, and Mario = Alyosha)?

Gately

I have no other place to ask this, but it seems kinda fitting.
What's a good "advanced" grammar book?

>jstor.org/stable/pdf/40755487.pdf

Well shit now I want to read that article. I haven't dabbled that much into Russian Literature. Got like 300 pages into War and Peace and I've read Solzhenitsyn. Maybe I should try out some Dostoevsky...

Eh, you're kind of misreading here.

Smerdyakov is an smug asshole and an atheist/anti-Christian who is less intelligent and less deep than Ivan in how he goes against religion, and ultimately hangs himself.

Gately is nothing like that and in fact an argument could be made that he's the most successfully heroic hero (yeah, my writing sucks, I'm too lazy to make it better right now) in the book.

That's nice. You have the the brothers mixed up. But there is only one candidate to be a fourth brother, that's Gately. Do some jumbling and you'll find it works.

Well for all the possibly (definitely) illegitimate children Avril had, you would think that she would be ok with another. Which would mean that to have another biological sibling JOI would have to be the father. But he seems deeply asexual... Gately's life is intertwined but he is not actually acquainted with anyone in the family until some point in the future after the events in the book take place. I don't buy this particular theory.

John Wayne?

oooh one more question:

what do we make of Lyle, his connection to the tape and JOI, and his weird Canadian super powers

Tertiary candidate. It really depends how far you want to go with this theory at all. Wayne just feels almost like a non-entity in the book to me, despite his often presence.

I thought that page was Poor Tony, or at least related to Poor Tony am I wrong? it's been a while since I read IJ, but I remember the part with Poor Tony convulsing on the subway was one of my favorite passages in the book

It's from the point of view of one of Poor Tony's addict friends iirc

Ok this is the character that confuses me most in the entire book. He levitates? Well before other weird shit starts happening, the book asserts in the first few hundred pages that the guy levitates and licks people as his only sustenance. Later on, when he is still purportedly alive, he appears with JOI as a specter (or is he real?) at Gately's hospital bed. The only time I legitimately laughed out loud in this book was the description of Don's awakening to Lyle licking him. The kids at ETA seem to be ok with him. I he the one fucking with shit at ETA towards the end of the book? is he the channel between the real world and JOI's spirit realm? I really just can't figure this guy out. Is he the fourth Karamozov?

Here's a paragraph from IJ that illustrates the two buckets comment I made

"Hal isn't old enough yet to know that this is because numb emptiness isnt the worst kind of depression. That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain. Authorities term this condition clinical depression or involutional depression or unipolar dysphoria. Instead of just an incapacity for feeling, a deadening of soul, the predator-grade depression Kate Gompert always feels as she Withdraws from secret marijuana is itself a feeling. It goes by many names- anguish, despair, torment, or q.v. Burton's melancholia or Yevtuschenko's more authoritative psychotic depression- but Kate Gompert, down in the trenches with the thing itself, knows it simply as It."

He lengthily goes on to describe It. I interpreted this whole section as a vague categorization of depression: anhedonia, and It.

Maybe this was just my way of interpreting this section of the book but it seems to me that DFW is suggesting two different kinds of depression; they are linked and related but -It- is the soul crushing evil force that pervades life.

Seconding what this user said. You have been reading nearly a thousand pages about the same group of people; so I took the random AA guy as a reminder of this idea.

It was basically like getting told
"you only think these characters are special and significant because you've been learning about them for so long. Don't forget other people exist"