Wallace's editorial refusal to deliver Broom's set-piece payoff prefigures the designed non-closure of Infinite Jest
echoes
From: Gerry Howard on Discovering, Editing, and Hatching David Foster Wallace
- Real-world:
[secondary] Howard's account: Wallace herds every Broom
plotline into one room, primes the reader for "a spectacular piece of comic
vaudeville", then cuts the chapter off on a single line of dialogue — the raw's
double-quoted "Hey!" — rather than supply the expected climax, and defends the
withheld payoff in a long letter. [Observer interview]
- IJ echo: IJ's constitutive refusal of closure — the withheld "missing
year," the ending that sends the reader back to page 3 (the
designed-holes /
annular-structure reading) — the mature realization of the same instinct
against the conventional set-piece resolution.
- Weight: prefiguration