the rising rival mapping (Orin/Dmitri, Hal/Ivan, Mario/Alyosha)
This asks whether Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov underlies the novel, mapping the three Incandenza sons onto the three brothers. It is contested because the parallel is suggestive but thinly built into the actual scenes: the novel names the book just once in passing (p. 969's "the good old Brothers K."), and no page carries the brother-by-brother mapping itself.
Scenes
Adjudication
This crux has an adversarial ledger: The Novel's Structure. The per-reading verdicts are below.
Discussed in
- American Hamlet: Shakespearean Epistemology in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest
- Community book club 3
- Community book club 4
- Infinite Jest: To Be, or Not to Be (David Foster Wallace Lecture I) — Hardcore Literature lecture series, ep. I of IV, pages 1–233
- 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 Eschatological Imagination: Mediating David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest