whether the gaps are constitutive design and reconstruction is misreading
This asks whether the novel's famous gaps and non-ending are deliberate architecture rather than an unfinished or evasive stopping point. What hangs on it is how you are meant to read the book: as a puzzle whose missing pieces can be reassembled, or as a work built to refuse closure so that "solving" it misses the point.
Scenes
- Scene 001: hal admissions interview
- Scene 003: interview aftermath er
- Scene 014: attache wets recliner
- Scene n024: joi filmography
- Scene 038: marathe steeply disguises
- Scene 078: found drama inception
- Scene 085: hal joi audience films
- Scene 147: afr finds entertainment
- Scene 178: joelle q interview master
- Scene 179: hal accomplice blizzard weston
- Scene 185: fackelmann sunshine beach
Adjudication
This crux has an adversarial ledger: The Ending. The per-reading verdicts are below.
Theories on this crux
Discussed in
- 'Infinite Text': A Review, an Excerpt, and an Interview (Anne Marie Donahue, Boston Phoenix Literary Section, March 1-7 1996)
- 'Neurotic and Obsessive' but 'Not Too Intransigent or Defensive': Editing David Foster Wallace
- A Brief (Crowd-Sourced) Interview with Michael Pietsch — Infinite Winter (2016)
- A Sometimes Funny Book Supposedly about Infinity: A Review of Everything and More
- Books of The Times: A Country Dying of Laughter. In 1,079 Pages.
- Bookworm phone follow-up — DFW by phone from his home in Illinois (KCRW, August 3, 2000)
- DFW in conversation with David Kipen — City Arts & Lectures, San Francisco (June 17, 2004)
- David Foster Wallace!
- Fellows Find: Infinite Jest at 20
- Five Dials No. 10: Celebrating the Life and Work of David Foster Wallace 1962–2008
- Four Theories Toward the Timeless Brilliance of Infinite Jest
- I Hate Infinite Jest ep. 23 (pp. 652–682) — guest Hannah Smart: the Marlon Bain endnote, Avril–Orin, and a spoiler run through the wraith, JOI's suicide, and DMZ
- IJ Book Club Ep. 43 (S3 Ep 9): In the Mind of DW Gately — live close-read of the Fackelman flashback and the two-wraiths visit (pp. ~910–933)
- IJ Book Club Ep. 45 (S3 Ep 11): ACCOMPLICE! — the club reads the film straight through: the AIDS-twist plot walked beat by beat, the Lyle-as-Himself's-accomplice wink landing at its exact dosing-morning placement, and Hal's snowed-in excavation of his own memory (pp. ~944–950)
- IJ Book Club S2 Ep. 11: The Vapors — endnote 304 close-read (Struck's plagiarism, le Jeu du Prochain Train, Bernard Wayne) and Joelle cleaning at Ennet House (fn 304 + pp. ~732–~747)
- IJ Lecture IV: The Year of Glad (Hardcore Literature) — the wraith orchestrates, Hal wraith-dosed with DMZ (and maybe shown the film), the too-late head-dig, and the AFR-victory missing year (pp. 795–end)
- Michael Pietsch to DFW, December 22, 1994 (second-read letter + cut-suggestion list)
- Never mind the lit-bros: Infinite Jest is a true classic at 30
- Slate Audio Book Club: Infinite Jest — Roiphe, Patterson, and Surowiecki on the mess, the design, and the sadness (recorded ~March 2009)
- Teach Me Good: Clare Hayes-Brady teaches Infinite Jest and David Foster Wallace to two comedians (recorded ~13 Feb 2021)
- The Crowd and the Individual: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and Don DeLillo's Mao II on the Place of the Novel in the Age of Television
- The Great Concavity Ep. 13: Rob Short — AA's Big Book, William James, and Wallace as recovering theory addict (April 2016)
- The Great Concavity Ep. 19: first-time Infinite Jest readers — Rachel Laird & Amy Peltier on finishing the book (recorded ~late summer 2016)
- The Great Concavity Ep. 21: Clare Hayes-Brady — The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace, resistance to closure, and Wallace on gender (recorded ~November 2016)
- The Great Concavity Ep. 40: Greg Carlisle — Elegant Complexity, the shadowed-circle structure, and answering IJ's big questions with Occam's razor (recorded ~mid-September 2018)
- The Great Concavity Ep. 46: Marshall Boswell — The Wallace Effect, the anxiety of Wallace's influence, and the anti-Wallace backlash (recorded ~February 2019)
- The Great Concavity Ep. 9: Jenni Baker on Erasing Infinite — erasure poetry from every page of IJ (early 2016, Infinite Winter's opening weeks)
- The Language of Landscape, Information, and Disturbance: An Existential Look at the Literary Techniques of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
- The Quest for Infinite Jest: An Inquiry into the Encyclopedic and Postmodernist Nature of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest
- Well, duh
- «L'Infinie Comédie»: pourquoi il faut lire David Foster Wallace
Essays
- Annularity
- First Chapter Last: rereading the Year of Glad
- Gately and Hal: The Withheld Meeting
- How Infinite Jest Was Read: 1996–2026
- Structure and Hamlet
- The Aesthetics of Withholding
- The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest: the debut as prehistory
- The Editing of Infinite Jest
- The Ending: State of the Debate
- The Endnotes
- What Wallace Said: The Author on Infinite Jest, 1996–2008
- What the Drafts Know: Manuscript Evidence and the Big Theories