hal-narration-drop
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 |
| The anti-Entertainment & the book-as-samizdat family | open |
Discussed in
- 'Infinite Jest' Turns 30 — Hermione Hoby on WNYC's All Of It with Alison Stewart (30th-anniversary radio hour, with listener calls and texts)
- 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)
- Infinite Cast Part 108: Hal a week clean, Mrs. Waite's cake (pp. 845–854) — commentary segment (~14 min): not an NA share, the past-life mother taken personally, Wallace-as-Mrs.-Waite — and not a word about the bus heist
- 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
- The Apocalypse Archive, Chapter 4: The Inverted Nuke in the Garden — David Foster Wallace's Archival Emergence (esp. sec. 4.4 on Infinite Jest)
- \"I Am in Here\": Fragmentation and the Individual in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest
- ‘Infinite Jest’ Has Turned Thirty
- “I Am in Here”: A Comparative Reading of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis
- “Infinite Jest” Has Turned Thirty. Have We Forgotten How to Read It? (New Yorker anniversary essay + an online forum thread)