Mirrors & reflection

Mirrors in the novel are instruments of self-regard turned, at their darkest, into instruments of death. On the tennis side they organize an ethic — opponents, nets, and fences become reflective surfaces, and the counsel is to "See yourself in your opponents." Domestically they multiply into vanity and dread: the obese father's double-width mirrors, partygoers dancing before the very mirror Jim cut for the final Infinite Jest. The image acquires lethal charge in the A.F.R.'s roadside gambit — "stretch mirrors across U.S. highways" that dupe drivers off the road — which the book pointedly rhymes with AA's mirror "hauled out in front of" newcomers, "the same instrument pointed opposite ways." That doubling pays off in Gately's final scene, where he "'wrecks' instead of stopping, like the drivers duped by the mirrors of the Canadian terrorists" — recovery and annihilation glimpsed in the same glass.