Essays

Long-form study essays.

63 total.

• Addiction and Recovery
  The Substance in all its forms, and why the clichés of Boston AA turn out to be the novel's most serious ideas.
• Annularity
  Circles, cycles, and waste-fueled fusion — how the novel's physics is also its shape.
• Avril and Orin: The Dead-Letter Office
  The Moms and the son who fled: letters answered by a fictional mailroom flunky, Subjects shaped like a mother, and an estrangement that ends under glass.
• Communication and Solipsism
  Everyone in the novel is trying to get out of their own skull — the essay on why almost nobody manages it.
• DeLillo and Infinite Jest
  Every other literary father of Infinite Jest is inferred from resemblance; Don DeLillo is the one Wallace confessed, dated, and pinned to a page range, in letters that run from an anxious 1992 fan note to the dread of finishing.
• Depression and anhedonia: the two species of the It
  The two species of the It: Kate Gompert's psychotic depression versus Hal's anhedonia, kept rigorously distinct.
• Disability and Deformity
  Wheelchairs, veils, and the U.H.I.D. — how the novel treats the damaged body as its most honest surface.
• Dreams
  The dream-material read together: what the novel does below the waking line, and which dreams turn out to be load-bearing.
• E Unibus Pluram and Infinite Jest: the essay that wrote the novel's thesis
  The 1993 television essay read next to the novel it prefigured: where IJ executes E Unibus Pluram's program, and where it outgrows it.
• Entertainment and the Self
  Why the fatal cartridge is only the limit case of what every screen in the novel is already doing.
• Family and the Hamlet Machine
  The Incandenzas as the Hamlet machine: poisoned father, remarried mother, and the son who can't act.
• Fathers and Sons: the transmission belt
  The transmission belt: what Incandenza fathers hand their sons, and whether it can be refused.
• Film and Optics
  Jim's two careers read as one: lenses, light, and a filmography that keeps annotating the novel around it.
• First Chapter Last: rereading the Year of Glad
  The Year of Glad opening reread as the ending it is — the admissions room walked with everything known, from "I am in here" to the grave-dig sentence.
• Gately and Hal: The Withheld Meeting
  The book's two load-bearing arcs — the prodigy going down, the burglar climbing up — who never share a sentence until the one the last page promises and withholds.
• Ghosts and Wraiths
  The case for taking the wraith literally — and what the novel gains if you do.
• Girl With Curious Hair and Infinite Jest: the exorcism and the answer
  Girl With Curious Hair as the exorcism: the story collection where DFW burned out the irony IJ answers.
• Hal and Mario: The Honest Channel
  The one relationship the book presents as fully functional: the brother who can't mean anything and the brother who can't do anything but.
• Hal's collapse: the theories
  The theories of what happened to Hal — DMZ, mold, withdrawal, the wraith — weighed against each other.
• How Infinite Jest Was Read: 1996–2026
  Thirty years of readers: the 1996 raves and pans, the canonization and the sainthood, Infinite Summer, the litbro backlash, and the 2026 wave that let the book be a book again.
• Infinite Jest and The Brothers Karamazov
  The quieter intertext: Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha laid over the Incandenza sons — and why a documented obsession is not yet a demonstrated structure.
• InterLace and the Death of Broadcast
  How the novel kills broadcast television and builds its successor — teleputers, cartridges, pulse-purchasing — and the honest grade on the "predicted streaming" reputation: a poor forecast of machines, a superb one of the market they run on.
• Irony and Sincerity
  The novel's central bet: that sincerity can survive being seen — the anti-irony argument in full.
• Joelle and Gately: The Veil and the Bottom
  The novel's one love story: a voice without a face and a body without a voice, and what recovery lets two professional hiders offer each other.
• Language and Grammar
  Militant Grammarians, OED childhoods, and why usage is a moral arena in this book.
• Last Hands: Galleys, Corrections, and Thirty Years of a Moving Text
  Wallace kept revising the book in the galleys, corrected his own first edition by hand, and the publisher emended it again twenty years later: the text of Infinite Jest is a thirty-year event, not an object.
• Maps and Territory
  Eschaton's map-territory collapse as the novel's master diagram for representation gone wrong.
• Marathe and Steeply on the Outcropping
  The night on the outcropping: why the novel hands its sincerest argument to a legless fanatic and a fraud in a wig — and refuses to let either win.
• Memory and forgetting
  What the novel buries and when it digs it up — trauma, repression, and the economy of forgetting.
• Nationalism & O.N.A.N.: the onanist continent
  The onanist continent: Gentle's Clean U.S. Party, Subsidized Time, and Canada as the novel's political unconscious.
• Orin and Hal: Brothers on the Phone
  Brothers who never share a room: the whole estrangement conducted over a see-through telephone, more than half of it lies.
• Pemulis and Hal: The Nonnegotiable Currency
  The prodigy and his dealer: a friendship run on barter — math for vocabulary, urine for loyalty — that the book erases between an endnote and a dumpster.
• Reading Together: The Infinite Summer
  The summer of 2009 that read Infinite Jest out loud together: the mechanics, the guest voices, Fitzpatrick's study of it, and the irony that the novel's own one-way media economy never foresaw the networked crowd that saved its readability.
• Structure and Hamlet
  The novel's architecture — Sierpinski gasket, annular design, the missing year — and the Hamlet armature under it.
• Subsidized Time: the calendar as joke, cage, and dating puzzle
  The calendar auctioned to sponsors: the year-list as one designed gag, a culture that can't number its own days, and the contested puzzle of what year it really is.
• Surveillance & Disguise
  Steeply's dress, Joelle's veil, hidden cameras — the essay on watching and being watched.
• The Aesthetics of Withholding
  The four great non-answers — the cartridge, Gately, Hal's lost year, the meeting — read as one engineered method, not four loose ends.
• The Body & Tennis: discipline, the machine, and the price of the Show
  Discipline, the machine, and the price of the Show — the athletic body as the novel's test bench.
• The Boneless Christ
  Don Gately prays to a God he does not believe in and the desire lifts anyway: the novel's religious argument, from the beliefless knees to the boneless-Christ image the book takes its darkest sacrament from.
• The Boston Novel
  The city under the novel: real streets, real AA, the halfway house Wallace lived in — and the honest answer on whether the redrawn map hides a code.
• The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest: the debut as prehistory
  The debut as prehistory: what Broom already knew, and what IJ had to unlearn from it.
• The Death Nobody Saw
  The most-documented death in the book is the one nobody sees: the sidelong discovery, the reconstructed engineering, the will, and finally the dead man talking — and the beribboned bottle the text refuses, three times, to explain.
• The Editing of Infinite Jest
  The two-year editing war, letter by letter: what the editor asked, what Wallace refused, and why the legend of the publisher's big cut has the story backwards.
• The Ending: State of the Debate
  State of the debate on the last page: what can be settled about what happens after the novel stops.
• The Endnotes
  The apparatus you can hold in your hand: 388 notes hiding whole scenes, the author's fight to keep them, and why the flipping is the point.
• The Ethics of the Wallace Archive
  The opening of Wallace's papers and the fight it started: what a dead writer's private margins owe scholarship, what they owe the living, and what the estate's restriction did to what can now be verified from them.
• The Failed Entertainments
  Endnote 24 read whole: a fake scholarly catalogue of films that refuse their audiences, a father filmed over and over, and five tries at one entertainment — unfinished, unseen.
• The Figurant's Cry
  The extras whose mouths move without sound: the wraith's theory of the figurant, the nurse who screams Help for eleven hundred pages, and the reader as the only audience the book's background lives get.
• The Image-Systems: what the novel teaches you to see
  Blue that arrives with the dead, heads dug up nine hundred pages apart, a KNIFE written on a mirror and finally sticking out of one: the recurring images read as the novel's memory of itself, planted early and fired late.
• The Listener's Economy
  The listener on the towel dispenser: sweat for counsel, attention as the scarcest thing in the book, and a nature the novel declines to settle.
• The New Sincerity, As Actually Written
  The most-cited idea in Wallace criticism, cited for something it didn't say: what Adam Kelly's 2010 New Sincerity actually argued, why its respondents flattened it, and what the difference does to reading the novel.
• The Samizdat: A Dossier on the Entertainment
  Everything the book actually tells you about the film at its center: what is on the cartridge, what watching it does, why only one copy matters, who mailed the fatal one — and the four places the text stops.
• Time and Its Perception: the tortured second and the gift of the Present
  Under the sponsored calendar runs the novel's real clock — the felt second: the torture of the unit that keeps coming on and on, and the recovery discipline of building a wall around it one heartbeat at a time.
• Two Houses: E.T.A. and Ennet House, the novel's paired institutions
  One hill, two regimes: the academy that pays monthly rent on what it almost buried and the halfway house below it — and how much of the mirror between them is actually in the book.
• Under the Veil: The Two-Way Question of Joelle's Face
  Is Joelle veiled because acid ruined her face or because it was too beautiful to bear? The novel's most elegant trap: the veil works identically either way, and the witnesses never agree.
• Videophony
  The seven-page comedy of the videophone's collapse — masks, Tableaux, and the dread of being seen — and the Zoom era that keeps re-reading it as prophecy.
• Wardine, yrstruly, and the Voice Problem
  The novel's most contested pages — Clenette's Wardine narration and the yrstruly monologue — and the four incompatible readings of the borrowed voice, each held at full strength.
• Wayne, the AFR & Avril: the theories
  The quietest conspiracy in the book: the evidence tying John Wayne, the AFR, and Avril together.
• What Wallace Said: The Author on Infinite Jest, 1996–2008
  Twelve years of the author on his own novel: the 1996 blueprints, the later reconstructions, and where the pages agree with him.
• What the Drafts Know: Manuscript Evidence and the Big Theories
  The Ransom Center archive almost answers the big questions — who dosed Hal, whether the wraith is real, what happens in the missing year — and this essay walks the marquee draft exhibits to show why a manuscript proves only what Wallace considered and rejected, not what the finished book does.
• Who Narrates Infinite Jest?
  The book opens with an "I" and then almost never says it again: the ghost who narrates by trespass, the boy whose frame fits but whose access does not, and a locker-room "we" that rules out both — why the narrator you cannot find is the one the novel is about.
• Win or Die in the Attempt
  The boy who played every match with a Glock at his own temple and won everything: the unranked number one, the kindness that had to watch him die, and the locked suite the academy keeps as its cautionary scripture.
• You Need to Quack This Way: Wallace on the Sentence
  The last long interview Wallace gave was about usage, not fiction: the snoot ethic, puff words, longhand "caviar work" — and the language-obsessed household he had already written, where correctness is love, leash, and inheritance.