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Infinite Jest is a 1996 novel by American writer David Foster Wallace. Categorized as an encyclopedic novel , [ 1 ] Infinite Jest is featured in Time magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005.
- David Foster Wallace
- 1996
Orin is an NFL player who has been having nightmares about his mother, Avril. Hal has developed a secret marijuana addiction, and spends much of his time secretly getting high in the Pump Room at E.T.A. Don Gately is a 27-year-old narcotics addict who robs houses to finance his addiction.
Feb 1, 1996 · In short, Infinite Jest (the novel) is the direct opposite of Infinite Jest (the movie within the novel). Ironically though, the book’s publication was intensely marketed and hyped in the US (as a comedy, mind you, which cannot be further from the truth!); it has become, in most English-speaking countries, especially since DFW sadly “eliminated his own map”, a cult bestseller of sorts.
- (94.3K)
- Paperback
Sep 23, 2024 · Infinite Jest is a novel by David Foster Wallace that was published in 1996. It satirically attacks the vacuous predilections of contemporary American culture mercilessly while shamelessly reveling in them.
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- External Links
The novel derives its name in part from a line in Hamlet, in which Hamlet refers to the skull of Yorick, the court jester: "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!" In addition to being the title given to...
In the novel's future world, North America is one unified state comprising the United States, Canada, and Mexico, known as the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.). Corporations purchase naming rights to each calendar year, eliminating traditional numerical designations; for example, "The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment" and "The...
The Incandenza family
1. James Orin Incandenza, an optics expert and filmmaker (see "Filmography" entries below in External Links), is the founder of the Enfield Tennis Academy. He is the creator of the Entertainment (a.k.a. Infinite Jest or "the samizdat"), an enigmatic and fatally seductive film that was his final and most cherished creation. He was strongly attached to Joelle Van Dyne, his son Orin's strikingly beautiful girlfriend, and used her in many of his films, including the fatal Entertainment. It is sug...
The Enfield Tennis Academy
1. Michael Pemulis- A working-class child from an Allston, Massachuesetts family and Hal's best friend. Pemulis is a prankster and the school's resident drug dealer. He is also very proficient in mathematics. This, combined with his limited but ultraprecise lobbing, made him the school's first Eschaton master. (Eschaton, a computer-aided turn-based nuclear wargame, requires that players be adept both at game theory and pegging targets with tennis balls. In Greek πόλεμος (polemos), means "war"...
The Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House
1. Don Gately - A former thief and Demerol addict, and current counselor in residence at the Ennet House. One of the novel's primary characters, Gately is physically enormous, an avid Alcoholics Anonymousmember, and intricately (though not obviously) connected to both the Enfield Tennis Academy and the international struggle to seize the master copy of the Entertainment. During his middle-school and high-school years, Gately's size rendered him a formidable football talent, and he excelled in...
The plot partially revolves around the missing master copy of a film cartridge, titled Infinite Jest and referred to in the novel as "the Entertainment" or "the samizdat". The film is so entertaining to its viewers that they become lifeless, losing all interest in anything other than endless viewings of the film. Quebec separatists are interested i...
In the book's future, advertising's relentless search for new markets has led to a world where, by O.N.A.N. dictate, years are referred to by the name of their corporate sponsor. 1. Year of the Whopper 2. Year of the TucksMedicated Pad 3. Year of the Trial-Size DoveBar 4. Year of the PerdueWonderchicken 5. Year of the Whisper-Quiet MaytagDishmaster...
The fictional Enfield Tennis Academy is a series of buildings laid out as a cardioid on top of a hill on Commonwealth Avenue. This detail has certain thematic resonance, as ETA is in many ways the heart of the novel's setting, and a permutation of the American myth of a City upon a hill. Ennet House lies directly downhill of ETA, facilitating many ...
There are frequent references to endnotes throughout the novel. In an interview with Charlie Rose, Wallace characterized their use as a method of disrupting the linearity of the text while maintain...
Surveys
1. Marshall Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. ISBN 1-57003-517-2 2. Iannis Goerlandt and Luc Herman, "David Foster Wallace". Post-war Literatures in English: A Lexicon of Contemporary Authors56 (2004), 1-16; A1-2, B1-2.
In-depth studies
1. Burn, Stephen. David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide. New York, London: Continuum, 2003 (= Continuum Contemporaries) ISBN 0-8264-1477-X 2. Carlisle, Greg. "Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace's 'Infinite Jest'". Hollywood: SSMG Press, 2007. 3. Cioffi, Frank Louis. "An Anguish Becomes Thing: Narrative as Performance in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest". Narrative8.2 (2000), 161-181. 4. Delfino, Andrew Steven. "Becoming the New Man in Post-Postmodernist F...
Interviews
1. Laura Miller, "The Salon Interview: David Foster Wallace". Salon9 (1996). 2. Michael Goldfarb, "David Foster Wallace". Radio interview for The Connection (25 June 2004). (full audio interview)
Template:CitationTemplate:CitationTemplate:Cite webInfinite Jest. Reviews, Articles, & MiscellanyOct 29, 2018 · Published in the print edition of the November 5, 2018, issue, with the headline “How to Read “Infinite Jest”.”. Claire Friedman is a writer, a director, and an executive producer of the ...
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Apr 13, 2009 · David Foster Wallace. Little, Brown, Apr 13, 2009 - Fiction - 1104 pages. A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America. Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what ...
