Motifs

Recurring images and objects, with the scenes that echo them.

40 total.

• Annular shapes / circles / rings
  This is the novel's master geometry: rings, orbits, loops, and revolutions that turn up at every scale, from the physics of "cold annular fusion" (pp. 63-64) to the quit/binge loop of Erdedy's new-bong ritual (pp. 17-27) to the "recursive loop" of the attaché's rigged, self-repeating death by cartridge (pp. 54-55, 87).
• Billowing shapes
  Billowing is the book's horror-harbinger — a slow outward swell of fabric or darkness that signals dread is arriving.
• Birds & bird-omens
  Fallen and falling birds recur as omens, and bird-physiognomy marks the novel's predators and mothers.
• Blue (the color)
  Blue is the book's most saturating color-thread, running through sky, bodies, death, and — from its very first appearance — "on the cover."
• Cages
  Bars, cribs, and traps make encagement the book's figure for addiction and fame — the sense of a self locked in from which the advertised exit is a lie.
• Ceilings (viewer supine)
  This is what the horizontal see: the novel's supine figures — praying, hungover, dying, or just staring — look up at ceilings that seem to live.
• Chewing / being devoured
  Minds, cities, and the Show all chew people in this motif — the Disease rendered as a mouth.
• Clocks & datelines
  This is the narrow, formal counterpart to the theme of lived time: clock-faces and clock-pulses experienced as literal image and architecture, the machinery of the novel's subsidized datelines made visible.
• Dancing
  Dancing figures the novel's charged pairings and devotions — above all the opponent as "partner in the dance" (p. 84), which is where the image enters the book's index.
• Deformity / the grotesque
  The damaged body — displayed or hidden — is the constituency of U.H.I.D., and the grotesque runs from comic to unbearable across the novel.
• Doors, thresholds & revolving doors
  Doors in the novel are locked, missing, or revolving — and the Entertainment itself opens on one.
• Eyes rolling up
  Eyes rolling up are the body's involuntary tell where pleasure and pain meet — an image that recurs all the way to the Entertainment's viewers.
• Fetal / supine / horizontal
  The regression-postures — curled, entombed, on one's back — are how the novel positions its addicts and its heroes of non-action.
• Fog, weather & the Brocken-spectre
  Weather works as omen-machinery, and a mountain-spectre brackets the long Marathe/Steeply desert serial.
• Heads & skulls
  Heads are the book's central containers, targets, and relics — the place where its "I am in here" (p. 3) is spoken and where, in Hal's answer, he expects "[w]here I'm going to occur as a player" (p. 461).
• Hunched figures
  The hunched posture — bent over in waiting, vomiting, or addiction — is the novel's keyword for "tension before violent release."
• Insects
  Insects here are objects of dread, torture, and identification — small creatures trapped, tormented, or tormenting.
• Knives & spikes
  Blades and spikes recur throughout, aimed with unnerving frequency at the eye, and the spike-in-the-eye becomes the A.F.R.'s signature.
• Lenses, cameras & being-watched
  This motif holds JOI's optics and the book's spectation economy — who watches, through what glass, at what cost.
• Light & halation
  Light functions as signature and halo in the novel, and an aversion to fluorescence is a recurring family tell.
• Maps (eliminating one's map)
  This is the novel's private idiom for death: to die is to have your map eliminated, a face wiped from existence.
• Masks, veils & hidden faces
  A whole apparatus of concealment runs through the book, from U.H.I.D.'s veil to videophony's hanging masks to the A.F.R.'s smiling disguises.
• Mirrors & reflection
  Mirrors in the novel are instruments of self-regard turned, at their darkest, into instruments of death.
• Missed connections
  Decodings and near-recognitions that walk right past each other run all through the novel.
• Old TV shows
  A dense sediment of old broadcast television runs book-wide, surfacing from the feral-hamster section onward.
• Receding
  Loss in this novel is often rendered as a diminishing signal — a voice, a siren, or a gift growing fainter as it withdraws.
• Rodents, rats & feral hamsters
  The feral hamsters of the toxic Concavity give the novel one of its strangest recurring dreads, and rodent imagery radiates outward from them into pain, surveillance, and vermin-panic.
• Shadows
  A moving shadow works as "a sign of tension or danger throughout the novel," and Wallace choreographs light and shade to build dread.
• Smiley faces & forced smiles
  The have-a-nice-day face is the novel's tracer dye for lethal Entertainment — a cheerful rictus that keeps turning up as a warning.
• Spiders & webs
  The Incandenza family's spider phobia is expanded into a figure for the Disease and for the entertainment grid that spreads it.
• Squeaks, whirs & machine sounds
  A repertoire of small mechanical noises — squeaks, whirs, clicks — becomes the novel's audible signature of dread, and above all the sonic tell of the A.F.R.
• Talons, beaks & claws (vestiges of the primitive)
  A "vestiges of the primitive" thread runs through the book, in which human hands and faces keep sprouting the equipment of predators.
• Teeth & the dental
  Teeth carry Hal's paternal inheritance, the dream-currency of rot, and a running class-marker of addiction.
• The moon
  The moon is the face that never turns away — an image the novel loads with lunar timing and low, unwell dread.
• Vomiting
  "The novel is rife with vomiting characters," and the motif is flagged at the attaché's "sort of nauseous" duties before spreading through the book's population of the sick and the anxious.
• Waste & excreta
  Waste is the book's master medium — the body leaking at its boundaries and a whole economy built to displace what it produces.
• Water & submersion
  Tides, drowning, and the pull beneath the surface recur as the sea that keeps rising under Gately.
• Weeping addicts
  "The weeping addict... experiencing the loss of a substance" is a recurring figure that runs from Erdedy onward.
• Windows & faces against glass
  Foreheads on panes and faces pressed into glass recur as the image of a self caught, framed, and watched.
• Wraiths & apparitions (diction)
  Long before the wraith actually appears, the novel salts its language with wraith-vocabulary.