what JOI made it *for* (communication vs. weapon)
This asks what James Incandenza actually made the Entertainment for, weighing a father's desperate attempt to reach his son against a weapon built to kill. It is contested because the film's lethal use by the separatists may be a hijacking of an object that was never meant to harm.
Scenes
Adjudication
This crux has an adversarial ledger: James O. Incandenza's Death. The per-reading verdicts are below.
Theories on this crux
| Reading | Verdict |
|---|---|
| Purpose: JOI made it to reach Hal — the weapon use is downstream hijack | favored |
| Minor structure & design cruxes | favored |
Discussed in
- Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace
- Community book club 2
- Community book club 4
- Death Is Not the End: David Foster Wallace, His Legacy and His Critics
- 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
- I Hate Infinite Jest ep. XXXII (pp. 938–981, the end) — guest Tim Eastwood: the ending-theories finale — the Lyle-toothbrush DMZ walkthrough, the single-quote narrator argument, and the Marathe ER identification
- I'm Hannah Smart who wrote the LARB \"Mister Squishy\" essay. I'm developing a DFW biography. AMA
- IJ Book Club Ep. 19: Silent and Dim and the Same Temperature He Is — Gately's home life, the P-terminals, the MF-cup climax (pp. ~438–480): the in-utero ending reading
- IJ Book Club Ep. 22 (S2 Ep 2): The Back-Door Slip — the government-side samizdat briefing, the Avril/Wayne tableau, Lenz & Green, the hand-model scene with endnote 234, and Arslanian's fusion lecture (pp. ~548–575)
- IJ Book Club Ep. 36 (S3 Ep 2): A Garden Variety Wraith — live close-read of the first full wraith scene (pp. ~827–836)
- IJ Book Club Ep. 46 (S3 Ep 12): You Ain't Gonna Learn What You Don't Wanna Know — endnote-24 filmography walkthrough + Hal on the floor (pp. ~948–951)
- 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)
- Infinite Cast Part 107: Don's hospital nightmare (pp. 837–845) — commentary segment (~21 min): the wraith-as-narrator DM, the Entertainment as shell-opener, Gately in the crib
- Infinite Cast Part 120: Hal considers Wayne, Mikey at AA (pp. 951–960) — commentary segment (~28 min): Hal's blankness as the first true symptom, the first-person timing check, the DMZ triad
- Infinite Jest Extraction
- Infinite Notes — co-(re)-reading notes for Infinite Jest
- Mapping the Zone Ep. 06: Il ne faut plus qu'on pursuive le bonheur — pp. 410–503 (Marathe/Steeply, Clipperton, Gately's routine, the Antitois, the mattress)
- Overdue Ep. 200: Infinite Jest — Andrew's deadline read, the Swartz architecture arriving secondhand via chronology blog posts, and a pre-election Gentle/Trump reading (recorded September 2016)
- The Great Concavity Ep. 19: first-time Infinite Jest readers — Rachel Laird & Amy Peltier on finishing the book (recorded ~late summer 2016)
- The Legacy of David Foster Wallace