/InfiniteJest/

>>9696768
Because DFW is a bad writer that only became famous by appealing to loner intellectual types who are interested in feeling better about themselves through such references

>>9696768
The entertainment includes Joelle naked (she's the most beautiful person in the world, remember), looking at the viewer and saying she is so, so sorry. The lens of the film is altered to approximate what the world looks like to a newborn baby. This is mixed with DFW's psychocosmology he makes that's obsessed with the Magna Mater (great mother) Jungian archetype, the mother who devours you whole (psychologically speaking), who kills you in one life and gives birth to you in the next, like Avril's black-hole personality, like the Oedipus complex/Hamlet and Gertrude, Hal having a Coatlicue complex (Coatlicue = Native American devouring mother goddess who represents the fertility of earth and also its destructiveness, portrayed as having many snakes wrapped around her, gave birth to many of the gods).

.... "I have become an infantophile"; Hal knows Latin; he memorizes which words are Latinate and which Germanic in etymology; he notes that the sign "EXIT" would read "He leaves" to a native speaker in Latin. This is all in that first chapter there, for a reason.

Infant in Latin means "mute", "unable to speak", "speechless". Hal has become, not a lover of infants, but a lover of being mute. Also a lot of the book deals, from a range of subtlety to really obvious ("getting in touch with your inner infant" at the end), with the theme of infantilization, associated also with themes in the book of catatonia, stasis, paralysis, inability to communicate, and even (yes I must get Freudian here) castration

But while the infant for much of culture is something despicable, worthless, annoying, puling, weak, DFW on the other seems to glorify it. Hal, in becoming infantile (watching Infinite Jest the movie reverted him to it?) has been redeemed. Like Mario, also something of a grotesque helpless infant. DFW associates infanthood with greater sincerity, greater love, a greater naivete, a paradoxical strength in weakness in true Christian fashion. "Verily, you must become children again to enter the kingdom of Heaven."

>>9696768
He thought it would be a good Joyce reference

>>9696846
Very nice analysis

>tfw you didn't make the connection between the mother-death-cosmogeny suggested in IJ and the obvious reincarnation implied therein

Very nice catch regarding Hal's speech problems and infanthood

>>9696774
I don't want to call you a pseud bc I think this is a reasonable response to much of IJ, particularly some of the more pointless footnotes. But still, even if you didn't like the underlying themes of IJ, there must have been moments that interested you. Don Gately's encounter in the bar when his friend gets shot is primo surreal and reminded me of the lynch essay. Plus Marathe and kate gompert's discussion also in a bar is really well put together. Idk, you have to stick it out to the end before you drop it man

>>9696935
Idk man I don't get the sense he was trying to ape ulysses too much w/ IJ

>>9696774
if you think knowjgn what metempsychosis means makes you a loner intellectual you are exactly the kind of normie DFW was ACTUALLY pandering to

TLDR: hang yourself faggot

>>9696949
>Idk man I don't get the sense he was trying to ape ulysses too much w/ IJ
Ulysses is semi-parodically modeled off of Hamlet the same way IJ is? Hal is jaded intellectual Stephen Dedalus searching for his father figure (literal father figure = Simon Dedalus = JOI, symbolic father figure = Leopold Bloom = Don Gately)

>>9696988
sure, but that's trivial in comparison to all the ways they are fundamentally different.

also the jaded intellectual is a hallmark character of western literature in general, and as often as not, an author self insert.

>>9696846
>Hal, in becoming infantile (watching Infinite Jest the movie reverted him to it?) has been redeemed.

really? doesn't look like it. He doesn't seem so great in the prologue ending to me.

>>9697126
He can't communicate (an important theme in the book obviously) his experience but he has become more sincere. You can obviously see this change of character from the rest of the book where he's more anhedonic, disaffected, and jaded. The irony DFW offers is that, precisely because of his extreme sincerity, it seems he is unable to communicate with other people now --- the dystopian culture Wallace imagines is so saturated with irony that a person trying to be sincere can't communicate with other people.

>>9697333
yeah, his whole system of communication until the "incident" is essentially producing whatever persona was suited to his interlocutor in a really impersonal/detached way
"gaining a soul" as it were made his experience of his life sincere and authentic, but he could not actually communicate his newfound inner life because his system of communication hitherto had been purely reactive/external
so he can't really speak, but compare the narration in the first chapter (it's first personal stream of consciousness) to the rest -- the difference is clearly the presence of an inner life

>>9696968
The references are one thing, but the core problem with DFW is his 'thinking about thinking' maximalist voice. Not that maximalism is bad, but his strain of it is especially grating.

The world is complicated, but not in the way that he conceives it. It is not a downwards spiral of irony. If DFW had a modicum of life experience beyond his depression and the ivory tower of his education, he would have seen this. Even his investigative journalism reeks of this fascination with his own mental spiel rather than the larger world around him

>>9697397
to say dfw conceived of the world as a "a downwards spiral of irony" is a gross misattribution