Infinite Jest

[Anonymous No.18905953]

Those who have read this monstrosity, get in here. What did you honestly think about it?

[Anonymous No.18905961]

Anal

[Anonymous No.18905987]

I know hating it is a meme now but I enjoyed it. Probably more as a “project” book than as anything deeply meaningful. But I had a good time with it.

[Anonymous No.18906012]

>>18905987
Same. It's definitely not the best thing I've read but it was enjoyable to tackle 20 pages a day or so for a few months. It's also a legitimately funny book which seems to get glossed over in a lot of the discussion, it's not at all a chore to read most of it aside from the footnotes.

[Anonymous No.18906019]

>>18905953
To answer my own question, I think the Ennet House & AA stuff, and the residents' stories before coming in surely must be the best writing about drugs, addiction, failure, and recovery ever. In fact, reading the section about Erdedy waiting for the woman to bring massive amounts of weed near the beginning was what convinced me that the book was worth reading.

As for the rest, I'm not sure how good it REALLY is. There's some great characters and great moments at ETA, but also some not so good stuff.

I liked the ending with Gately on the beach, and I didn't mind that it was vague and inconclusive. But what I kind of hate is the gap between that and the chronologically-latest beginning of the book, in the Year of Glad. Some of the stuff that seems to be implied to have happened between YDAU and Hal's breakdown with the academic guys seems kind of dumb, and implausible, and DFW just wants us to somehow imagine it all happening coherently and be satisfied with that.

Great book, but I'm kind of bothered by some of this stuff, and it makes me question if my judgment is wrong somehow.

Also, the endnotes were mostly shitty.

[Anonymous No.18906022]

>>18905953
It is good, putting in the time to really work everything was one of the more rewarding literary experiences of my life, especially the structure. It is amazing how little is throwaway and what is tends to be parts people love, almost every single bit is important to structure and theme.

[Anonymous No.18906037]

>>18906019
>DFW just wants us to somehow imagine it all happening coherently and be satisfied with that.
The answers are all in there, he wants you to put in the time for what is difficult instead of just doing what is easy and feels good, like almost every character in the novel does.

[Anonymous No.18906047]

>>18905953
liked the eschaton games. didnt like that part with the tennis player who held a gun to his head, that was stupid and not funny. good book overall

[Anonymous No.18906055]

>>18905953
I thought it was great

[Anonymous No.18906066]

what was up with the wraiths?

[Anonymous No.18906087]

>>18906037
The saga of Eric Clipperton is one of the few parts I have found which could just be cut from the book without effect, which it supports theme it takes it too a ridiculous extreme and does nothing for structure. The videophone bit is the other big one, every thing in it was stated better elsewhere and does not read as an aside, should have been an endnote at most but just left out.

[Anonymous No.18906121]

The Call of the Crocodile of it’s time.

[Anonymous No.18906153]

>>18906019
>the end notes were mostly shitty
Totally agree with this. It seemed to me half of the notes were there just as a way from the author to play with you, they usually didn't give any insight. Of course there is important stuff there (the whole explanation of the AFR for example), but that's the exception

[Anonymous No.18906203]

>>18905953
I really enjoyed it. Not the greatest book ever but i felt like i was reading something genuine, written with interest and care.

I also like the weird interactions you have with others who read it. Like a secret club

[Anonymous No.18906345]

>>18906019
>Erdedy waiting for the woman to bring massive amounts of weed
And then he never comes back up

[Anonymous No.18906358]

>>18906345
>erdeddy, just as the woman whom he is awaiting, never appears
BRAVO DAVID

[Anonymous No.18906361]

Majority of the end notes could of fit in a parentheses

[Anonymous No.18906375]

>>18906345
Erdedy is a regular in the Ennet House/AA sections and the girl he is waiting for is Molly Notkin.

[Anonymous No.18906462]

>>18905953
I have an interesting idea for you guys. Everyone focuses on Infinite Jest's theme of addiction, but there's another big theme and that's the cult of competition. This is what really connects the obsessive athletes to all the rehab junkies in shambles. Otherwise the ETA stuff seems mostly unrelated other than Hal's descent since it hardly covers addiction.

DFW was critiquing America's libertarian "freedom and personal responsibility" religion. Can't handle all the freedom and you become a slave to your vices and your most base hedonistic impulses? Too bad so sad, freedom ain't free! He didn't name this critique all the way though, he was still nervous about it and wondered if it was a Literally Hitler way of thinking, so the book has ambivalent anxious conversations about this topic between Marathe and Steeply.

Don Gately, the hero who strives to overcome and destroy his narcotics addiction, has to go to AA and submit to a higher power, both the organization/community and GOD who is described as "miraculously keeping it all together." Oh no, Gately is an authoritarian personality! AA is a bunch of zealous fundies, that's so like restrictive maaaaan! There's a lot of junkies who think they can do it on their own and they end up dead. In this anti-individualism, it's a book that makes an extreme break from the American cowboy literary tradition.

The athletes, then, of course are the flipside of this. As a contrast to the desperately unhealthy junkies they are rising to the top of the system in terms of health and strength, real winners technically, but they are scared shitless of failure and falling into the void. There's one athlete who really emphasizes this tension by pointing a machine gun at his head and threatening to off himself if they don't let him win. Great part, always stuck with me. Gately's foil, Hal Incandenza, can't take the heat and pressure. As Gately struggles out of his vices with help from AA, and rises more and more, Hal is left all alone with no helping community or God, and descends into a full-on breakdown.

[Anonymous No.18906478]

>>18905953
So but like it was okay.

I liked it a lot.

[Anonymous No.18906487]

>>18906462
If anyone is skeptical about this interpretation, they should first mull over this essay, "The Hazards of Being Free: Thinking About Not Thinking in Infinite Jest", which interprets the book as postmodern conservatism.

https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1796&context=cc_etds_theses

>No one wants to be told how to think. But Wallace wants to challenge us on this point. Sometimes freedom—or rather, freedom as we commonly conceive of it—works against us. Sometimes a person can have too much of it. This may, on the face of it, offend our modern liberal sensibilities, but it is an idea featured throughout Infinite Jest. Having too much freedom is in fact how Marathe characterizes the American people, all of whom would apparently rather die watching the samizdat unendingly than live without it. He compares the American people to a child whose father “cries out ‘Freedom!’ and allows his child to choose only what is sweet, eating only candy, not pea soup and bread and eggs, so his child becomes weak and sick.” In other words, if Americans are addicted to the pleasures of entertainment, it is because they—like the child gorging herself on candy—lack a kind of fatherly guidance. “How to choose any but a child’s greedy choices,” he asks Steeply, “if there is no loving-filled father to guide, inform, teach the person how to choose? How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?” (320)

[Anonymous No.18906508]

>>18906361
The short ones are mostly used to get you used to flipping back and forth. Some of the later short ones are just screwing with you, you are fairly certain it is just one of those short throwaway endnotes but you know it could be something more because sometimes it is, it is used to distract you and reflect the distraction of life.


>>18906462
You are close but you are ignoring what else Gately and Hal have in common, what Mario knows innately. Gately and Hal never learned to be honest or the value in what is difficult, Gately never had anyone who cared enough to teach him, Hal's parents care too much and are blinded by that care, they can not see what he needs and just gives them what they think he needs because they also never learned this.

[Anonymous No.18906509]

I have started this book multiple times, and the furthest I got was about page 300 (I get further every time), but then put it down again and have to restart. Basically where I stopped was when you first begin to learn about that interactive TV device that the arab guy uses. All I really want is to read the parts about the depressed character since I heard that's the best part of the book, but I'll read it all sometime

Btw I haven't finished A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again because I got evicted from my flat in the middle of reading it, not even kidding

[Anonymous No.18906527]

>>18906487
This is the only essay I've found that addresses Infinite Jest's obvious post-liberalism. Most academics' pozzed anarchist minds are just not going to go there. Of course DFW himself was milquetoast and confused about all this, as I said. His attitude is a lot like the part where James Incandenza half-heartedly, defeatedly warns Orin about pornography, not realizing his son is already deeply immersed in it. James fails to be the father figure- the authority figure- his boys need.

>Steeply argues that Americans do not need or want a state-sponsored program, or something like this, “to paternalistically do their thinking and choosing for them” (321). “These things you find so weak and contemptible in us,” he argues, “these are just the hazards of being free” (320). But perhaps the “hazards of being free” are greater than Steeply realizes. Left alone to their devices, human beings tend to make bad decisions; this is a basic premise of the novel. “Not all compulsion comes from without,” Marathe warns; a person may be politically, or even physically free, but psychologically (maybe even spiritually) a slave to their baser instincts and desires; in such a case, a person may very well need someone or something to “paternalistically do their thinking and choosing for them."

Uh oh, no wonder art hoes hate this book, talk about daddy issues

[Anonymous No.18906548]

>>18906527
I feel like that German tennis coach and his rambles are relevant to this dimension. Nice posts btw

[Anonymous No.18906571]

>>18906548
About the constricting lines on the tennis court

[Anonymous No.18906632]

>>18906527
Last post, I promise. Just skip ahead to page 18 to 22 of the essay I linked and you're going to start seeing a LOT of stuff about the relation between Infinite Jest and fascism. Obviously DFW was not a goose-stepping Nazi or something, but it nicely covers important quotes from the book such as:

>The thing with Schtitt: like most Europeans of his generation, anchored from infancy to certain permanent values which—yes, OK, granted—may admittedly, have a whiff of proto-fascist potential about them, but which do, nevertheless (the
values), anchor nicely the soul and course of a life—Old World patriarchal stuff like honor and discipline and fidelity to some larger unit—Gerhardt Schtitt does not so much dislike the modern O.N.A.N.ite U.S. of A. as find it hilarious and frightening at the same time. [...] Schtitt was educated in the pre-Unification Gymnasium under the rather Kanto-Hegelian idea that jr. athletics was basically just training for citizenship, that jr. athletics was about learning to sacrifice the hot
narrow imperatives of the Self—the needs, the desires, the fears, the multiform cravings of the individual appetitive will—to the larger imperatives of a team (OK, the State) and a set of delimiting rules (OK, the Law).

And so on and so on. That segment's the real meat of the essay, as far as what I'm talking about goes.

Remember this classic takedown of DFW, by the way?

http://exiledonline.com/david-foster-wallace-portrait-of-an-infinitely-limited-mind/

Once you get past its cleverness, the guy who wrote it is obviously a total degenerate. And also one of the few people to pick up on what I'm talking about. He knows if Infinite Jest were taken to heart, a gov like China would come along and throw retards like him in jail for promoting a culture of spiritual opium. He also doesn't understand that IJ uses drugs as a metaphor more than anything, for our addictive plight in general.

[Anonymous No.18906637]

>>18906548
Yes precisely, you anticipated my next point. And thank you

[Anonymous No.18906661]

>>18906632
You are picking out bits which support and ignoring everything else.

[Anonymous No.18906862]

>>18906462
Everyone in IJ who has anything to do with politics are doing the same thing as Hal and Gately, just using politics instead of drugs or tennis/being a self described lexical prodigy. Marathe is fighting "the paper invaders," his cause is a literal joke and does not exist off paper, just wants to be able to say great convexity instead of great concavity, if he succeeds in his goal nothing will change and all the problems of anulation remain, just a line on some paper is moved. Furthermore Marathe seeks his salvation in someone who would be an American if it were not for the paper invasion and is going to turn on his friends and everything he supposedly believes in for a woman who has never had any ability to communicate in even the most simple and rudimentary fashion. IJ makes politics out to be the more pathetic than drug addiction.

[Anonymous No.18906898]

>>18906375
Yea but what the fuck was the point. I only read half btw

[Anonymous No.18906965]

>>18906898
Ededy and Gompert show aspects of Hal's future regarding pot, you would have gotten this if you had finished it but you should have had a decent idea considering Erdedy and Gomperts chapters are presented with Hals secret use stuck between them, he was fairly blunt here and was blunt for much of the early chapters.

[Anonymous No.18906998]

>>18906965
Or was Hal's use revealed just after them? I forget now, either way it should have been reasonably obvious, two pot smokers shown at their bottom followed by MC just getting started in pot.

[Anonymous No.18907010]

>>18905953
one of the best introspections on soft drug culture and addiction

[Anonymous No.18907030]

>>18905953

I'm still reading this, I'm on page 173.

My favourite chapter thus far is the YursTruly and Poor Tony. It was a hilarious parody of A Clockwork orange, where the whimsy disappears and the narrator is a realistic junkie. He isn't the witty or sophisticated Alex who is redeemed in his love of High Culture, but a violent junkie who can barely speak proper english and wouldn't think twice about hurting people if it meant getting their next fix.

[Anonymous No.18907044]

I enjoyed it

[Anonymous No.18907066]

thought it was great. read a lot more by the guy too.

[Anonymous No.18907083]

>>18906375
>the girl she's waiting is Molly Notkin
Wait, I never caught that one, how did you know?

[Anonymous No.18907170]

>>18907083
He gives you bits and pieces and his dealer and they all line up with Notkin. Notkin's source is snake keeping chicken fucking Tommy Duce (sp?) who also dealt to Gompert, Pemulis and Green lived in his trailer with Mildred and his daughter for awhile.

[Anonymous No.18907175]

>>18907170
>pieces and his dealer
ABOUT dealer, not and.

[Anonymous No.18907214]

I've just read it for the second time. I'm still not 100% sure what's going on with the DMZ at the end and the Wraith. I get that something went up into the drop ceiling and got the DMZ, then was messing around near his toothbrush, but I don't really follow a lot after that.
I get that Stice's head stuck to the window is some kid of hallucination, but everyone else acts like it really happened. They also talk to Hal but only act like he's being a little weird and laughing. I'm gonna be honest I kind of sped through this and focused more on Gately so I think I missed a lot.

[Anonymous No.18907227]

>>18907214
>I get that Stice's head stuck to the window is some kid of hallucination,
What? That makes even less sense than the DMZ on the tooth brush theory. Are you trolling?

[Anonymous No.18907231]

>>18906012
How can you read a book over a period of months? Don't you forget most of the beginning by the time you get to the end? I don't mean major plot points, I'm not retarded, but there's certainly no way you'll remember most of the minute details and people's names and specific points and descriptions that contribute to the themes. I can't imagine how you get anything out of reading except pleasant distraction if you spend more than a week on a book. At that point they might as well just be unrelated disjointed paragraphs that don't form a cohesive work.

[Anonymous No.18907259]

>>18907231
not the guy you're responding to, but you're not going to remember everything the first read thru of a book like IJ anyways. also it used to be a very common way to read, books were published serially all the time.

[Anonymous No.18907278]

>>18907259
That's true, but even in the case of a book that requires multiple read-throughs, the faster you read the fewer it will take.

[Anonymous No.18907287]

>>18907227
That it's a hallucination from the DMZ. The book says his forehead stretches back half a meter and that Hal sees his "true face". That sounds like a hallucination. But other kids talk about it happening so I'm confused about how much of that chapter is real and how much is hallucinated.

[Anonymous No.18907295]

>>18907170
I remember about that guy, I just never made the connection, thanks anon

[Anonymous No.18907299]

>>18905953
95% slow pain 5% great writing

[Anonymous No.18907305]

>>18906462
>pointing a machine gun at his head and threatening to off himself if they don't let him win.
that shit was so funny
nice post anon

[Anonymous No.18907325]

>>18906571
nice

[Anonymous No.18907334]

>>18907066
based

[Anonymous No.18907352]

[Anonymous No.18907373]

>>18907287
No, its not. You missed a great deal or are trolling. Would take a massive conspiracy for his forehead not to be torn off, entire school.

[Anonymous No.18907378]

>>18906661
>>18906862
Well, I did say right from the start that DFW was nervous about it all and had an ambivalent approach to it. I see a lot of the "politics is all useless maaan" as a cope disclaimer from his liberal upbringing. The so-called "proto-fascism" of AA (and the AA stuff is of course the strongest, most memorable part of the book) ultimately has much more to say than the pretty run-of-the-mill le dystopian Johnny Gentle satire. DFW was simply not nonconformist enough to get all the way

>>18906632
I wanna pick on Ramon Glazov a little more. His idea of a saint is Hunter S. Thompson, who I thought was super cool when I was 15. It's interesting though because a degenerate like Thompson and his opus Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is like the ultimate parody of the American cowboy literary tradition I mentioned earlier...

[Anonymous No.18907536]

>>18906508
Close to what?

[Anonymous No.18907611]

>>18907378
>Well, I did say right from the start that DFW was nervous about it all
And you have no way to know that, just pulled it out of your ass. Your view is built off of other peoples interpretations and is a prime example of what he talks about in IJ, you ignore what is apparent for what suits you and invent proof when need be.

[Anonymous No.18907646]

>>18907611
>And you have no way to know that
I know it from the way DFW approaches it in the book itself, lol. My view came to me while reading it and then after searching around I found an essay about it by a like-minded person. I quote the essay because I agree with him. I think you're probably just annoyed now that IJ has these elements

[Anonymous No.18907935]

>>18907646
And you have to ignore context and most of the novel to do it, but hey, gold star for you.