is the wraith real (vs. Gately's fever)
undecidable-by-design
This asks whether the wraith of James Incandenza who appears to Gately is a literal ghost in the novel's world or a hallucination of Gately's fever. What hangs on it is how much of the book's late machinery — from Gately's ICU visions to the strange events at the tennis academy — you take as really happening.
Scenes
- Scene 001: hal admissions interview
- Scene 039: lyle weight room guru
- Scene 122: eta supper stice hal
- Scene 162: gately wraith figurants
- Scene 167: stice stuck to window
- Scene 168: fully functional phil
- Scene 169: gately dream md temptation
- Scene 170: hal horizontal vr5
- Scene 175: fackelmann scam wraith returns
Adjudication
This crux has an adversarial ledger: Is the Wraith Real?. The per-reading verdicts are below.
Theories on this crux
| Reading | Verdict |
|---|---|
| JOI's wraith is real (and object-capable, with a possible Lyle division of labor) | favored |
Discussed in
- Community book club 1
- Community book club 2
- Community book club 4
- David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form
- 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
- IJ Book Club Ep. 05: Stop her! She stole my heart! — Mario and the U.S.S. Millicent Kent through Helen Steeply's Moment article (pp. ~121–144)
- IJ Book Club Ep. 08: When does routine become ritual? — the Feral Prodigy film, the Ennet House drop-in transcripts, and the Madame Psychosis broadcast scene (pp. ~170–193, archive-derived)
- IJ Book Club Ep. 17: Reinventing Government and History — the ONANtiad session (pp. ~375–407 + n.145): Luria authored experialism, found drama as critic-troll, the wraith skeptic holds
- IJ Book Club Ep. 35 (S3 Ep 1): Mama Ewell at a speculum party — Gately's resurrection: the breathing ceiling, Ewell's bedside confession, and the gospel according to Calvin Thrust (pp. ~809–827)
- 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. 40 (S3 Ep 6 by feed position): Dilaudid-colored Sky — the toothbrush fight arrives: Tim's duck-symbolism decode of the Stice window scene, the is-Hal-really-laughing dispute, Lyle the unreincarnated prankster, and Gately's Demerol dream (pp. ~876–891)
- IJ Book Club Ep. 41 (S3 Ep 7 by feed position): Meaning from angle of incidence redux — the narrative changes on the page: unfiltered Gately, Hal horizontal in the viewing room, the wraith's misleading account of Hal's speech, and a live three-copy punctuation hunt (pp. ~891–900)
- 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 106: Don and the wraith (pp. 827–837) — commentary segment (~18 min): the ghost is JOI and has been haunting the whole book, the coffin-hole lore, the figurant cosmology
- Infinite Cast Part 110: Hal and Stice's frozen head (pp. 864–874) — commentary segment (~10 min): the are-you-crying hint, a figure in the bleachers, Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern janitors — and not one word about the toothbrush
- Infinite Jest: To Be, or Not to Be (David Foster Wallace Lecture I) — Hardcore Literature lecture series, ep. I of IV, pages 1–233
- Infinite Notes — co-(re)-reading notes for Infinite Jest
- L'infinie comédie et la tâche ingrate du traducteur
- Michael Pietsch to DFW, December 22, 1994 (second-read letter + cut-suggestion list)
- Notes on Infinite Jest
- 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)
- Teach Me Good: Clare Hayes-Brady teaches Infinite Jest and David Foster Wallace to two comedians (recorded ~13 Feb 2021)
- The Eschatological Imagination: Mediating David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest
- The Great Concavity Ep. 40: Greg Carlisle — Elegant Complexity, the shadowed-circle structure, and answering IJ's big questions with Occam's razor (recorded ~mid-September 2018)
- The Great Concavity Ep. 46: Marshall Boswell — The Wallace Effect, the anxiety of Wallace's influence, and the anti-Wallace backlash (recorded ~February 2019)
- The Limits of the Infinite: The Use of Alcoholics Anonymous in Infinite Jest as a Narrative Solution after Postmodernism
- Understanding David Foster Wallace (revised and expanded edition)
- Viz. Wallace Week: Six Visual-Rhetoric Essays (UT Austin, 2012)
- an online forum — full-history archive digest
Manuscript differences
- MS-1993's title page carries a margin note already sketching DMZ's effects: "no speech--Death[.] See Wraith & Gately."
- Stice's "The Darkness" was literally "the Wraith" in MS-1993 — Hal even calls him "Wraithster."
- The moved-objects set read as a systematic pattern to the editor ("There are lots of references to moved objects")…