I just finished reading Infinite Jest. I know you've all

what do you want to know exactly?

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>>9204549
I'm mostly confused when i see diagrams like these, because i can't see where they piece together the story's end (including the final scene with Orin) when it all seemed so open-ended and ambiguous to me

>>9204611
The book is the infinite jest itself

>>9204611
The story is annular. If you go back and read the first chapter, Hal, who narrates, gives a few hints at what's going on. When remembering John Wayne he mentions how he was together with Gately and Joelle to dig up Jim's head that contains the master copy of the entertainment. There's more hints, like the medical attache receiving the entertainment from Arizona, where Orin lives.
Honestly I think it's better to just google whatever you want to know and read some essay or article because there's a lot of shit going on in IJ that's difficult to explain.

The Infinite Jest or A infinite jest.
Yeah bro just had what you are having right now like a week ago.

>>9204645
Wow, those two facts alone really help a lot, thank you
i'll make sure to keep googling whatever questions i have now but i was wondering if you could give me your opinion on Gately and Pemulis?

One of my first memories on /lit/ was a thread on IJ and i skimmed through some spoilers of people being upset with Don and Michael's actions towards the end of the book. Was there something I missed, because I really liked those characters

>>9204649
>>9204638
Elaborate please

>>9204645
And shit, I forgot to say that Orin was captured by the AFR (who had been stalking him for a while) because in the end Orin was the one who owned the master copy (when digging up Jim's grave Joelle says that they're too late; Jim's head is already empty. Orin got there earlier). Orin in one of the earlier chapters reveals that he's mortified by cockroaches. At the end the AFR uses this fear against him, threatening to cover him with the bugs (and subsequently kill him) if he doesn't give them the master. We know he gave it to them because he's still alive in the first chapter. Anyway the AFR has the entertainment's master copy and uses it to attack the US, which is vaguely referenced by Hal in, again, chapter 1, where he briefly mentions an advanced fighter jet flying north.

>>9204673
Also I have no idea what kind of problems a reader might have re Pemulis and Gately.
I personally didn't like how Pemulis tried to push Hal into taking DMZ but it's not relevant enough to be upset about. As for Gately, honestly I think he's like a character who did nothing wrong.

>>9204716
>>9204693
I'm glad most views i see on Don are positive, he really feels like the novel's hero. Thanks again for explaining some things to me anon

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend

I found a cool link where it explains tj ending very nicely but I wonder how exactly john wayne is brutally murdered

Does IJ go into any detail about that?

>>9204878
This is a great page, but unfortunately it gives no page# on which any hints are given about John Wayne's true affiliations and how he died.

>>9204645
Also, during their phone conversation, Hal asks Orin why he's using snail mail and Orin completely dodges the question.

>>9204673
Gately is a good guy. He's supposed to be a stand in for the reader's relation to the book and unconventional narrative. Gately is clearly not an idiot- he understands things around him- he just isn't that skilled at articulating it.

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>>9204716
Gately does bad things and is penetant.
Pemulis is a sociopath.

A friend of DFW recalls a scene removed from the book that he got in an early manuscript that details pemulis in a truck at a stoplight laying on the horn as a blind man walks by on the crosswalk, scaring the shit out of him, and causing him to convulse on the ground. Pemulis finds this riveting.

Pemulis is literally a more clever version of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkDNyxQlL_0

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>>9205353
>*Penitent

some of those charts and explanations seem to be missing the point i think. look up what DFW has said about it being a "projected ending." you can kinda piece together some of what happened, but i do believe a significant amount of it is left a little ambiguous. however, once you finish the book you realize there is so many details you probably missed out on. most people end up turning to the first chapter again, which happens in the end of the narrative chronologically. in this way i think the book mirrors the jim incandenza's move infinite jest, in which you want to watch it over and over again. i think this is sorta what >>9204638 was trying to say. but idk, thats just the camp i fall into

>>9205367
What are some things you wish you had clear answers to?

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>>9204539
But is it art?

>>9205425
i dont know what i would really want explained. sure i think itd be interesting to have a detailed description of what happens between the end of the novel and the year of glad, but i just dont think it is meant to be that way.

>>9205353
pemulis is the most hopeful character in the whole book desu
any other character DFW wrote would've reacted a whole lot worse to hearing their brother get raped in the ass by their father constantly

>>9205524
not to mention the fact that his expulsion and not being able to go to the whataburger means he doesn't get kidnapped/killed by the AFR

anyways jesus if this whole "the BOOK is the MOVIE" premise isn't the cringiest shit ever

>>9204645
This is slightly off right, the Entertainment was in Himself's coffin, the Anti-Entertainment was in his head? Am I miss-remembering this?

>>9205535
>the BOOK is the MOVIE
that makes it sound a lot more heavy-handed than it actually is. but the book does deal a lot with entertainment and the book itself is at least partly supposed to be entertainment for the reader. its not the whole premise of the book but i think it was intentional for you to at least think about it in that way.

>>9204910
>http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend
17 for the mention about helping at the grave. Re the affiliation with the AFR, it's strongly hinted that Wayne is the son of one of the Quebecois who invented the train game, possibly even the one who didn't jump.

>>9205572
you're right but i still think it's too heavy-handed. for me the books focus on "sexy" topics like drug addiction and fast sports and occasional violence leading to its addictiveness makes that point well enough

>>9204539
It's a MEME folks. Literally nothing to see here.

>>9205535
Pemulis was being targeted by the AFR?

You got memed. Congratulations!

There is absolutely ZERO ending to it. DFW pranked you for 1000 pages and wasted your time.

>>9205813
huh. The ending is on page 17

>>9205571
I don't believe there actually was an anti-entertainment.

Refer to the "conversationalist" segment, towards the end, and how Himself describes the copy in his head.

This just kind of occurred to me

Did JOI microwave his head in an attempt to destroy the cartridge?

>>9205916
nice catch

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What was up with the scene near the end where Ortho's face gets stretched "a couple feet" from the window it was frozen to? Most of the stuff in the story was "realistic" in that it didn't take liberties with the laws of physics or use any supernatural devices (except wraith). The scene was totally bizarre and doesn't make sense to me outside of like a DFW nod to lynch or something

>>9205927
im not entirely sure either. i was willing to write it off as either just random shit to fill time while you read more about hal's degeneration or maybe some weird joke about the book (looking out a window? stretching itself thin? not sure) but now im thinking

>>9205916
Why wouldn't he just shoot himself in the head instead?

rolling next book
1 : anjo pornografico
2 moby dick
3 v
4 catch 22
5 tbk
6 ulysses
7 alegorias do subdesenvolvimento
8 death of the father
9 freakonomics
0 abbas kiarostami

yikes. IJ discussions have rly gone downhill. havent read an IJ thread in like a year

>>9205797
One of the end theories is that the AFR attack Enfield at the end of the book

>>9205992
I thought that was more than a theory. wasn't there a whole busload of the AFR guys about to ambush ETA at the end?

>>9205927
well there also the conjoined twins that play tennis together. that ortho scene is one of my favorites though honestly. i laughed out multiple times while reading it.

>>9205948
I could be totally guessing here but maybe he was very affected by the death of Clipperton

>>9205957
just ready moby dick, thats the book i read before infinite jest

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>>9205916
...oh shit

>>9205908
He simply describes what the tape is made of, he never hints if it's the entertainment or AE. I don't see how this particular scene is an argument either way? Marathe specifically talks about the Anti-Entertainment later in the book on the ridge with Steeply, and I believe later at the Antitoi's (sp?) place

>>9206198
From talking to fellow pseuds I've gathered If you enjoy one, most likely you will enjoy the other.

>>9206229
Is the AE supposed to be the cure for IJ?

>>9204539
Imagine the zeitgeist of the fin de 20th siecle year 1996. The feeling is apocalyptic. Y2K might end the world. North Korea might trigger a nuclear holocaust. Or Pakistan. Or Russia. Who knows. But the sense is out there. The world could end. In many ways, its still there.

Now imagine, for purely literary theoretical reasons, you invent a narrative technique for capturing this western Hemispheric sense of imminent dread: your narrator is, within the world you create, a dead man. A ghost. This ghost has omniscience. It knows everything. It has omnipresence. It can be anywhere, and travel to any time, back and forward. It can hear the thoughts of every living person. And it is compelled to relate those thoughts to you, the reader, even though most of them are distantly, or even barely related to your main project. Because that is what it would be like to know and hear everything. It would be jumbled and cacophonic and confused.

Now imagine that you, the ghost narrator, are personally responsible for one or more Really Bad Things that happened during your life, and the consequences of which other, still living people, continue to advance toward even more Really Bad Things. All of which will be your fault.

Unless you can do something about it. Despite your omniscience and omnipresence, you have only very limited physical agency. It takes you an enormous effort to, for example, move a Japanese coca cola can. But, still, it's more than nothing and you have to try. You have to try, because:

1. A group of psycho Nuck terrorists are about to locate a terrible weapon that you created, even though by accident;

2. Those terrorists have suborned a chief advisor to the president of the United States;

3. Which president is batshit crazy and has already fucked with the US nuclear arsenal and threatened nuclear war with both enemies and allies;

4. Some of whom are none too happy about he giant radioactive toxic wasteland that president has made out of a sizeable chunk of North America;

5. Which terrorist group is also closing in on the involvement of your own sons, one of whom it is the sole occupation of your entire existence to have a meaningful conversation with, which, in your altered state, remains an attainable possibility;

6. But which will never happen in any conjunctive permutation of the events: nuclear war, terrorist attack on ETA, kidnap and murder of Orin or Hal or both;

7. The prevention of such attack, then being the obsessive occupation of your afterlife, along with maybe preventing the release of the terrible weapon, which itself has the power to destabilize world relations to the point of nuclear war.

The result of all of those narrative inventions and conditions would sound very like the novel we call Infinite Jest. And as for the ending, think about what that "Ultra Mach fighter" slicing over Hal's head signifies, given the afore mentioned points.

Making sense now?

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>>9209495

You forgot the Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse

>>9204539
It's called "Infinite Jest" because all that Wallace wanted to prove is that people will read something incomprehensible and try to understand it and pretend they do even if it's meaningless. He jested us all, even after death, he will jest forever.

>>9209519

Truly it was an Infinite Jest

>>9209505
>Famine on the right

How do I read this? Do I read the endnotes at the end or flip back and forth?

>>9209850
Flip back and forth

>>9209850
Flip back and fourth. Just have 2 bookmarks

>>9209495
i like the mention of "extremely limited physical agency" bc i think it's true of almost all of the characters, who are slaves to addiction, expectations, or both, and, in typical dfw style, must struggle very hard to make conscious decisions

What's the significance of only two sections of the novel being 1st person?

Hal's kind of makes sense in the beginning, but why does the unnamed ETA locker room kid get one near the end?

>>9209495

>Imagine the zeitgeist of the fin de 20th siecle year 1996. The feeling is apocalyptic. Y2K might end the world. North Korea might trigger a nuclear holocaust. Or Pakistan. Or Russia. Who knows. But the sense is out there. The world could end. In many ways, its still there.

As someone who was alive at the time, this is wrong. Nobody besides a few crackpots were concerned about the world ending in y2k.

>>9210597
um

it's Hal both times

>>9210597
I think you're forgetting
>Wadine be cry

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i watched 'the end of the tour' this morning, i've been wanting to read infinite jest for over a year now.
i have an epub of it but i don't think reading infinite jest on a kindle would be the best experience given the endnotes.

i'm going to order a used copy through amazon along with some post-it flags.

wish me luck /lit/--i am excited.

>>9210597
6/10 bait desu

>>9211082
gl. It gets really good after the first 200 pages. not even joking.

>>9211050
IT'S WARDINE YOU PLEB

>>9211082
>i'm going to order a used copy through amazon along with some post-it flags.
You really did just watch the End of the Tour.

I really wish something like IJ would come out, something with a really large impact that we would all read together and talk about for a couple months. I feel sad. I am pathetic.

>>9207378
Yes

>>9211175
That's your interpretation. This was never specified in the book. Perhaps Wallace meant to present it as a possible cure, but there's more to it than AE=ultimate cure for everything

>>9211158
what about what i said confirmed that i really did just watch it? is it a pleb thing to order the book off amazon or do you think the film has the capability to genuinely impact someone enough to incline them to buy the book immediately with a serious intent on reading it (hence the post-it flags)? just curious

and yeah, i've been watching the same DFW interview over and over again for a while now and for some reason i keep thinking about him. i can't get him out of my fucking head. i like reading articles and reviews of infinite jest from the early 2000s when it was blowing up. there's something really comfy about it, but it's depressing because i can't think of many times that's happened, everyone kind of rushing to read something like that together.

Ok SERIOUSLY I hadn't notice a detail in the first chapter I only got now by rereading and I think my head is fucked

This book doesn't have the right to be this good

It's called Jerusalem, by Alan Moore. We should read it

>>9211216
I meant your ordering post it flags right after watching the movie, as Mark Zuckerberg's copy of the book is one of the more memorable things about the movie.

>>9211237
oh, oh, oh, okay. whenever i would see people post their copies they'd typically be filled with the post-it flags and i figured it would be genuinely useful especially after seeing it in the film
what did you think of the film, anon, having read the book?

care to share?

>>9211225
I read the Economist's review of it a while back and it had me interested. It has to do with the digital age, right? I'd be down.

>>9211250
As a film, it's abysmal. As insight into DFW, it's ok, but nowhere near as good as his interviews.

It's a kind of exploration of Alan Moore's personal philosophy. It has nothing to do with the digital age, more with maximalism for maximalism's sake, the poetry of urban life and the philosophical implications of time as a dimension.

>>9211082
You're in for a journey, anon. Have fun

Side note--has anyone read Adam Levin's The Instructions? I am interested in it just because of its length and the guy was compared to DFW

>>9211591
I almost got an entire paragraph into that one.

>>9204693
Why did Orin already own the master copy? and why mail it to the attache?

>>9211225
What. It's been out for months. Are you telling me people haven't already read it? I have been curious as to why it isn't much discussed.

>>9204539
it's one mans imaginative and intelligently crafted journey into a complete misunderstanding of being human.

>>9211788
yeah it makes no sense why he'd have it. he also arguably cared the least about his father and his filmography

>>9211938
>>9211788

He was obsessed about gaining his fathers approval.

It was implied the medical attache had a sexual relation with Avril.

Orin wanted to inflict suffering on all who did wrong to his dad.

>>9210633
>As someone who was alive at the time, this is wrong. Nobody besides a few crackpots were concerned about the world ending in y2k.

How old were you? I was quite young 14, but I remember my dad making sure our computer wasn't connected to the internet on NYE.

>>9211974
Do we know if Orin and the AFR scene happens after the attache gets the entertainment? Doesn't the AFR learn about the master because of the attache? If Orin dug up the master, why would he have done that?

>>9204539
top kek lads we actually got him, he fucking fell for it big time!

>>9211817
Cause it wasn't that good desu.

>>9212146
so why havent you read it yet?

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Why were Roy Tony and Poor Tony included in the novel? It feels like neither actually did anything to progress the story

>>9214308
Ulysses-esque reasons.

Roy Tony represents the primal truth of mankind and the role of men in society, even he is helpless to his addictions and needs to seek help (he hugs steve erdeddy who technically has almost a polar opposite problem)

Poor Tony is just a stand-in for the ambiguity of gender and how alienation leads us to self-destruction.

>>9205916
I took it as that, don't they literally say that in the novel?

>>9214358
i mean, the entertainment is life itself, people get off about "it's the book, maaan"
but they dont really get it.

>>9214321
Can you tell me what that primal truth is? Honestly i liked RoyTony, he felt very genuine and his faith mimicked Don's in that he was willing to hug a stranger

I like your take on poor tony but he couldn't have been very alienated if C and yrstruly were his friends, right?

>>9214369
Men are essentially repressed rapists in our natural state. Roy Tony is that but even he couldn't live on base instinct alone, our modern world is too complicated, addictions get in the way.

The irony is that you'd think Erdeddy's high-brow life would protect him from this realization but he's even more distracted: in an equal state from harmlesss weed. But in some ways he's even worse, unable to even see "his problem" until he's scared into realizing it by Poor Tony (who has the gift of honesty from his circumstance).

I guess the point is that society is imbalanced on both ends.


yrstrly and C were basically unhuman. The fact that Poor Tony was amongst them just proves the point. He was a freak.

>>9212032
The Attache had the entertainment several before most of the novel's action takes place in YDAU.
So yes Orin' AFR scene is one of the last chronologically. The AFR didn't know about the master until they took the Antitois facility and found they only had duplicates.

Here's some things I don't understand:

James said he made IJ because he was hallucinating that Hal would not speak to him. Yet they're having an obvious exchange in the beginning of the book as he pretends to be a therapist? Also, I've heard that by Year of Glad, the AFR succeeded in toppling ONAN but how can that be since one of the headmasters in the beginning mention ONAN by name and that they investigate school matters very closely? Lastly, why would Hal be considering going into a new academy since he ended up taking first place in ETA after John Wayne was murdered?

A million thanks to whoever can answer any of my questions

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>>9205535
> jesus if this whole "the BOOK is the MOVIE" premise isn't the cringiest shit ever

I felt this way too.

And then I found myself listening to it as an audiobook for the fifth time.

Certain parts have more impact on me every time I read them, while other parts have less impact, leading my emotions to feel like more and more of a rollercoaster every time I read or listen.

I know of no other book that has achieved this effect.

>>9214483
1. He talks to Hal as a therapist, but he's not really listening as you can see at the end of that chapter with his quote: "son?" He can't hear/understand him. It's like a metaphor for God.

2. Year of Glaad is the "last" year, you have to assume that somewhere down the line ONAN will topple we just never see it.

3. Hal is about to graduate and is now looking at colleges.

>>9211788
>>9211938
Orin sent copies of IJ (which you can only make if you have the master) to everyone that Avril cheated on Jim with.

It's like a revenge or seeking aproval thing. I don't remember where, but there's a bit near the beginning of the book where Jim more or less reveals to Hal that his wife's been sleeping around with a lot of people. Then later in the book it is revealed that Orin had a very personal 1 on 1 with his father, which annoys Hal who says that it's rare to have Jim open up. We don't actually know what they talked about but I'm guessing that Jim told Orin that Avril was cheating and that's why Orin wants to get some sort of revenge.

>>9214657
the one-on-one Orin and himself share is about porn.

>>9204638
"I really the jest in the infinite"

Really makes you think.

Why did Hal's dad make a graphic, gay pornographic film?
Was Mario a bastard, cuck child?
Did James kill himself because Mario wasn't his child and his wife cheated on him?

>>9211082
It's unironically my favorite book - have fun pal!

>>9214937
>being a spoiling faggot

There's actually a theory going around that Orin was raped by Avril and fathered Mario

This could explain his birth defects, the hate towards Avril and his issues with women in general

>>9214937
it's a metaphor for the nature of writing. It requires someone to be kinda mentally-incestuous (as in self-aware) and very drawn into themselves, but more importantly writing is a way for to "connect" with other people.

if Sexuality is subliminal in everything we do (which it might be if you consider that it's the simplest form of human "connection") then in a way the process of reading is almost a sexual act, the melding of two consciousness (there's a reason this is revealed in the last section of the book).

Incest is not so different from being a homosexual in the scientific species-propegating sense, so himself's film kinda works as a metaphor in relation to writing, (specificaly in this male-oriented book).

The fact that the graphic, violent, and ends in the self-destruction of a vengeful person against someone is unwell speaks to the hopelessness of human connection, it more often than not results in misunderstanding, anger, oain and "the disease" of disasticfaction being spread, the very same one thtat causes our addictions)

>>9215392
It doesn't really matter who the father is. Avril's character and Mario's existence is really about an idea.
the helpless disgusting beauty of a woman's love.

>>9215449
Did your mother not hug you enough, anon? How is motherly love in any way disgusting?

>>9215461
It's beautiful man dont get me wrong, but it's also gross. It's limitless. A woman's love for her child is incredibly narcissistic and almost incestuous in a way (which is what her and Orin's relationship represents)

>>9215471
You mean Avril and Mario, right? Because her and Orin didn't seem to have such a good relationship from what I gathered (i could be wrong though)

>>9215485
Orin's relationship with her is strained because she loved him too much (there's lots of indications/suggestions throughout the novel that there was some traumatic history).

>>9214937
I think it was implied that Mario was a product of incest.

>>9214657
How did Orin know what the effect of the tape was?

>>9215568
that's a dumb question.
So is anything in relation to the anti-entertainment (heads up, it's just suicide)

don
't worry if you didn't funnderstand it, it's like a 6/10

>>9215510
>>9215449
>>9215392
>>9214937
It's made pretty clear that Tavis fathered Mario imo

>>9215615
my feeling is in regards to this book that it's not "realistic" and so all the characters and events really just represent ideas so in a sense it doesn't matter who the father is even though its more than likely is Tavis.

Truth is I dont think even he knows for sure, (though he suspects it) so it's ambiguous. Probably intentionally as Orin and Avril's "history" is also very vague

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Himself has no cock. when he's in disguise listing his medical procedures to Hal "phallectomy" is one of them.

This make the moms' cheating make much more sense.

>>9215732
jesus i cant believe i didn't catch this

>>9215732
That might just have been his way of saying he's a cuck

Does the place where Don Gately wakes up in the end matter? Also, was this flashback before or after the incident with the house burglary?

No die please

should I read this or gravitys rainbow? keep in mind I had the ending of gravitys rainbow spoiled for me by a shitty book reviewer.

>>9215568
He tested it on a random stranger in Arkansas, after hearing rumors of the Berkeley massacre from Joelle.