ghosts as Wallace's corpus-wide voice-possession device
This asks whether the novel's ghosts are Wallace's device for dramatizing a wider anxiety about voice, influence, and being spoken through. What hangs on it is reading the wraith not as a plot mechanism but as a key to how the whole book thinks about one consciousness inhabiting another.
Scenes
Adjudication
This crux has an adversarial ledger: The Wraith, Stice, and Lyle. The per-reading verdicts are below.
Discussed in
- David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form
- IJ Book Club Ep. 37 (S3 Ep 3): Wait — the wraith's confession, Gately's Mrs. Waite/death dreams, the mirror-bus plan, Hal's first-person return (pp. ~832–848)
- IJ Book Club Ep. 38 (S3 Ep 4 by feed position): Full of the sound and fury... — the off-the-board roadmap session: the head-dig as settled fact, JOI's save-Joelle scheme, the hole-communication mechanism, and the who-is-the-plant fight (no new pages)
- IJ Book Club Ep. 39 (S3 Ep 5): Ablutions, eh? — the toothbrush walkthrough delivered at last: Joelle at Gately's bedside, abiding between heartbeats, and the wraith-and-Lyle DMZ dosing mechanism argued in full (pp. ~854–mid-860s)
- In Which We Explore The Archives Of David Foster Wallace
- Narrative Modeling and Community Organizing in The Pale King and Infinite Jest
- The Great Concavity Ep. 12: David Hering — Fiction and Form, the Ransom Center drafts of IJ, and the Liverpool reading group (recorded 1 April 2016)