Manuscript differences

Manuscript-vs-book differences.

61 total.

Added between the manuscript and the book

• All Marathe/Steeply mountainside dialogues and most of the AFR material are post-1993 additions; the germ, however, dates to 1986.
• Hal's "get secretly high" clause in the Lung passage is a hardcover-stage insertion — the galleys have him descend and "exhale palely" without it.
• Mario's romantic encounter (Millicent Kent) is a post-1993 addition.
• Roughly half the endnotes are post-1993 additions, and the endnote system doubled as the refuge for material Pietsch wanted cut.
• The Bain/Steeply correspondence is a post-1993 addition.
• The Eschaton aftermath expansion is post-1993; Wallace fought cuts in this area with "canines bared."
• The Orin ending (tumbler-and-roaches) was a requested insertion, faxed June 11, 1995…
• The Year of Glad opening (Hal's admissions interview) was written in early 1994; the novel originally opened with the professional-conversationalist scene.
• The bricklayer e-mail is a post-1993 addition.
• The mold-eating incident is a post-1993 addition.
• The videophony essay is a post-1993 addition.

Cut before publication

• A "Preliminary Throat Clearings" front-matter section…
• A young-JOI scene — killing a black widow with his father ("I have one sober memory of my father…"), dated B.S. 1960 — was cut…
• Also cut from MS-1993 (Moore's inventory): Gately's "giant feral infant" sighting; the Marguerite/Isle of Demons anecdote (from Parkman, source of AFR names)…
• Also verified executed from the Dec-1994 list: the "myth of hairy woman" (ms 764) and the Roberval story (ms 529-32)…
• An early Avril post-coital scene with an unnamed older lover was cut.
• Hal's history-of-his-drug-use passages were cut repeatedly — Wallace kept removing explicit Hal-drug exposition.
• Hering's reading-room inventory adds three cut items…
• The Newsweek/HRC twenty pages additionally show draft material with no published counterpart…
• The jamais-vu thread — Hal's jamais-vu affliction, on the page from at least ms 533 through ms 683 — was eliminated entirely in the 1994–95 round…

Revised

• In May 1995, after Mary Karr warned Pietsch that Ennet House scenes drew on confidential Granada House/AA talk, Wallace changed names and details and added the…
• Infinite Jest was originally divided into two parts, like The Broom of the System; the division was abandoned before print.
• Orin's womanizing was softened between MS-1993 and print — the book's "idle little sideways 8's" line replaces the manuscript's coarser phrasing.
• The Marathe/Steeply "samizdat" vocabulary was still unsettled at galley stage…
• The Montclair's vital statistics were still moving in the handwritten draft — weight *3,700* → print "3,900 pounds, give or take"…
• The Quebec/AFR geopolitics are a late overlay…
• The bricklayer letter's comic weight was fixed between galleys and hardcover: galley *320 kg* became "75 kg" (p. 139).
• The duck-pond-draining scene (ms 1028) was "direly condensed" AND replaced…
• The galleys print "A.F.R.aid" twice for "afraid" in Dolores's p. 765 passage — an error with "obvious allusive frisson" corrected away for the hardcover.
• The ghost/machine idiom was un-inverted in the handwritten draft — *a ghost in the machine* became print's "A machine in the ghost, to quote a phrase."
• The last medical attaché's ethnicity was revised across drafts — from one-quarter to one-half "ethnic Arab."
• The p. 171 phone-answer was trimmed one m: galley *Mmmyellow* → hardcover "Mmyellow" — while the novel kept BOTH spellings at other sites.
• The teleputer description in the attaché section was revised in longhand on a typescript verso…
• The verified tail — nearly two hundred word- and punctuation-grain galley→hardcover changes across the whole book, each direction-decoded against the blog's…

Renamed

• Avril's full name gained "Tavis" between galleys and hardcover — "Avril Mondragon Tavis Incandenza, Ed.D., Ph.D." is a last-stage insertion.
• Major character and calendar names differ in MS-1993: Orin was "Cully" (also "Hugh")…
• Petropolis Kahn's moniker was renamed at the last stage: galley *The Wholly Mammoth* → hardcover "The Petropulator" (p. 907).
• Stice's "The Darkness" was literally "the Wraith" in MS-1993 — Hal even calls him "Wraithster."
• The Erdedy section carried its own title in the 1992 manuscript — "Three Protrusions."
• The Wardine section was earmarked for a different subsidized year in draft…
• The opening episode's subsidized year churned across three names in typescript…

Endnotes and apparatus

• MS-1993 is physically a patchwork — mixed fonts, nested pagination (22, 22A–J, 23…), footnotes at page bottoms, marginal doodles…
• MS-1994 carried a "smiley logo" and *Gaudeamus Igitur* headings its editor couldn't place; neither appears in the digested print text…
• Six public HRC scans are one object — pages 4–9 of a self-paginated handwritten draft of the garage-monologue scene, with the scene's ending already in place.
• The 1997 paperback is the corrected text scholars should cite (e.g. Hal "thirteen" → "eleven").
• The endnote system itself was invented in April 1994 as a length-management device, pitched with a five-point rationale Wallace vowed to "fight w/all 20 claws…
• The working subtitle "A Failed Entertainment" was killed by Pietsch ("it's not" what people should be told they're buying)…
• Two galley-only typographic devices: a circle marker in the triple line break before the yrstruly section (p. 128), and no quarter-circle corner device on p.…
• Wallace was still revising between the advance galleys and the first printing…

Unchanged by design

• Fifteen-plus scenes flagged in the Dec-1994 cut list survived into print…
• Luria P—'s indistinctness survived three separate editorial asks across the Dec-1994 letter…
• Pietsch's first response to MS-1993 independently surfaces the Hal-as-narrator reading…
• The ending was always the ending: MS-1993's main narrative "concludes just as the novel does," and the aclimactic shape was argued for explicitly through the…
• The grave-dig "concluding dream" — described by the editor as "digging w/Joelle in grave"…
• The moved-objects set read as a systematic pattern to the editor ("There are lots of references to moved objects")…
• Wallace defended one proposed scene cut in the margin with "Well, it introduces three characters, five themes and two settings."…

Planned but never written

• A draft stage had the Entertainment reaching Don Gately…
• A draft-era idea had China objecting to Subsidized Time as a co-opting of its lunar calendar, with the possibility of war…
• After Gately's final line, MS-1993 adds outline notes for unwritten chapters…
• HRC manuscript notes (quoted in Burn, 2nd ed., notes 4–5 to ch. 3) show Wallace planning Pemulis as the DMZ vector…
• MS-1993's title page carries a margin note already sketching DMZ's effects: "no speech--Death[.] See Wraith & Gately."