DFW names Hal the book's "purely inactive" hero
echoes
From: Live with David Foster Wallace, Author of Infinite Jest (WORD e-zine live chat)
- Early text: n/a (interview) — participant Keats: "So which hero in IJ is
the purely inactive one?"; dfw: "Keats -- Hal." [L692, L707]
- IJ echo: Hal's passivity / inertness as his defining condition; a
live-1996 author gloss aligning Hal with inaction (adjacent to the
Hamlet-inaction frame Wiley's article draws out). Not a mechanism claim
about what broke Hal.
- Weight: shared-preoccupation