eschaton-function
This asks whether the Eschaton set piece — the students' elaborate nuclear-war game — is just a bravura comic interlude or carries a real thematic point. It is contested because one reading treats it as entertainment for its own sake, against the widely held view that the game dramatizes the novel's map-versus-territory concerns.
Scenes
Adjudication
This crux has an adversarial ledger: The Novel's Structure. The per-reading verdicts are below.
Theories on this crux
| Reading | Verdict |
|---|---|
| Minor structure & design cruxes | favored |
Discussed in
- A Deep Insider's Elegiac Tribute: The Work of Don DeLillo in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest
- An Exhaustive Essay of pages 380-442 of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (a Preliminary Explanation/Summarization of a Preliminary Explanation/Summarization)
- Call it Something I Ate: language-games, addiction, and dialogic possibility in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest
- Community book club 1
- Community book club 2
- Hardcore Literature IJ Lecture II: In the Zone (pp. 233–489) — the Entertainment as womb-return, Joelle's veil and overdose, flow states, AA clichés, the freedom debate, Eschaton
- IJ Book Club Ep. 15: Quick question, Mike — Is the map the territory? — the shortest Marathe/Steeply interlude (p. ~317), then Eschaton whole (the I-Day debacle + n. 123)
- IJ Book Club Ep. 34 (feed-titled S2 Ep 4, in practice the season-2 finale): Kevin cries for all of us — Pemulis's dismissal (endnote 332) and Hal's Inner-Infant meeting (pp. ~795–808)
- Infinite Cast Part 44: Eschaton rules pt 1 — commentary segment (~15 min): both men on the hill made grotesque on purpose, Wallace as both of them, and RAND's real-world Eschaton
- Infinite Cast Part 45: Eschaton pt 2 with Matt Christman — commentary segment (~22 min): abstraction-then-humanity, Eschaton as recursive-maze allegory, Ingersoll's heel turn, why the book makes people mad
- Infinite Jest's Enfield Tennis Academy & End Zone's Logos College
- Mapping the Zone Ep. 05: Like Last Time, Only Moreso — pp. ~306–410 (Troeltsch, Mario/Avril, Marathe/Steeply, Eschaton, Boston AA, Mario's puppet film, Lyle)
- 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)
- The Apocalypse Archive, Chapter 4: The Inverted Nuke in the Garden — David Foster Wallace's Archival Emergence (esp. sec. 4.4 on Infinite Jest)
- The Great Concavity Ep. 7: Chris Ayers on the Incandenza filmography posters and the IJ20 cover contest (Jan 2016)
- The Work of Play in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest
- The World of David Foster Wallace
- Viz. Wallace Week: Six Visual-Rhetoric Essays (UT Austin, 2012)