“I Am in Here”: A Comparative Reading of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis

TL;DR

Allard den Dulk's 2021 article (in the Ca' Foscari journal English Literature) is a sustained comparative reading of the two opening sections of Infinite Jest — Hal's admission interview and Ken Erdedy's breakdown — against Kafka's The Metamorphosis. Its central move is to treat "What has happened to Hal?" not as a plot puzzle (depression, DMZ, the Entertainment) but as a question of what metaphor Hal's condition literalizes: like Gregor Samsa's transformation, Hal's "metamorphosis" is an opaque sign of selfhood and of the risk of writing fiction, but where Gregor evades the task of becoming a self, Hal has taken it up — which is why den Dulk reads the novel as ultimately redemptive. Its opening section on the novel's genesis, built from the Wallace papers at the Harry Ransom Center, stands on its own: it dates Hal's admission-interview opening to the “Typescript Draft” submitted in June 1994, places the conversationalist and Erdedy sections in far earlier drafts (some possibly 1986), and quotes Michael Pietsch's and Steven Moore's revision advice — the fullest published genetic account of how the book came to open where it does.

Key claims

• The opening is a late addition. Hal's admission interview "appeared relatively late in the development of the novel, namely in the “Typescript Draft” submitted in June 1994" — "a manuscript subsequently trimmed down for the “Draft for Copyedit”". No earlier drafts of the opening section survive in the archive.
• The conversationalist and Erdedy sections are old. By contrast, the professional-conversationalist scene (scene 005) and Erdedy's breakdown (scene 004) exist in early individual handwritten or typed drafts, "some of which may date back to 1986", and are in the partial manuscript sent to the publisher in May 1992 (for the book to be contracted) and the Spring 1993 revised typescript.
• David Hering's 1986 dating of the conversationalist scene: in a footnote, den Dulk reports Hering's dating of an autobiographical draft of the conversationalist scene to 1986, in which "Hal is called 'David,'" the piece is titled "What are you exactly – unadorned autobio – automabiography", and it is "set in 1974 (April 1), with David 13 years old" (Wallace himself would have been 12 on that date). [WP 15.7]
• Pietsch's and Moore's advice shaped the new opening. In June 1993 editor Michael Pietsch told Wallace the manuscript needed significant cuts, called Hal the "emotional core of the novel" and "hoped “to see lots more of Hal in extremis”". Later that year Steven Moore, advising on the then-opening (the conversationalist scene), wrote: "1-5: Hal at therapist: this is wild and funny, but rather too much so;" and warned "it will give the reader the wrong idea of what kind of novel this is going to be". Den Dulk reads the admission interview as Wallace's combination of both notes — keeping the focus on Hal while adding the sadness.
• The Erdedy section may have sparked the new opening. In the first two typescripts, Erdedy directly followed the conversationalist opening; in the version sent to Moore, Wallace had inserted an Orin section between them, which Moore recommended to "cut or condense," re-pairing Hal and Erdedy. The handwritten Erdedy draft already contains the insect imagery and its three "protrusions"; "Three Protrusions" even "becomes the title of the Erdedy section in the 1992 manuscript".
• The Kafka thesis. Wallace described Kafka's fiction as a "radical literalization of truths we tend to treat as metaphorical". Reading Hal and Erdedy against Gregor, den Dulk asks "what metaphor is literalized by Hal’s situation?" — answering that both texts literalize a metaphor of selfhood and of the fear of writing fiction; both use Kafka's "exformation" (the exclusion of crucial information); both open on their narrative climax.
• Hal versus Gregor and Erdedy. Unlike Gregor (who thinks he can sleep off his transformation) and Erdedy (who refuses to consider his problem), "Hal, contrary to Gregor and Erdedy, does not deceive himself about his situation." Hal wants to be understood ("Hal wants to be understood for who he really is"), displays "awakened feeling" and empathy (following Casey Michael Henry), and asserts an interiority the admission committee cannot hear — so where Gregor's insecthood is pure alienation, Hal's is a bid for acknowledgment.
• "Call it something I ate." Den Dulk resists the plot reading of the mold flashback (scene 001) as an ingestion clue: it is "tempting to read this episode as a reference to him having ingested something harmful" (e.g. "the – fungus-based – hallucinogen DMZ"), "But note that Hal says “call it something I ate”", which he glosses instead as Hal craving the (socially "horrific") development of a self, and as pointing forward to Hal's late "[t]he world seemed suddenly almost edible" epiphany.
• Narration and the interior self. The opening is Hal's only first-person section; "This changes on page 851, after Hal quits marijuana", where the switch to first person symbolically underscores Hal's interior self "waking up" as the "narcotising flood recedes" (following Jamie Redgate). Den Dulk argues Redgate's "ironic contempt" no longer applies in the opening section: there Hal's appeals to interiority depend on acknowledgment by others.
• The redemptive conclusion. Because Hal takes up "the existentialist task of self-becoming" and "symbolizes literary disclosure and communication", the novel's opaque "metamorphosis" is not nihilistic but "rendering Infinite Jest as a redemptive novel", where "the reader has to actively contribute to bring" out its meanings.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Hal's opening condition is not a plot symptom but a literalized metaphor of the fear and task of self-becoming — and Hal is "on the mend"

• Crux: hal-condition
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] Following Rob Mayo and Casey Michael Henry, den Dulk reads Hal's situation as a "prompt to consider what the condition represents" rather than through "plot-hypothesizing," and finds an "awakened feeling" and empathy in Hal at the opening. [sec. 3.3]
  • [text] Hal in the opening "does not deceive himself about his situation" and "wants to be understood for who he really is" — a "defiant assertion" of interior life absent in the younger Hal — read against the catatonia/animality descriptions (scene 001). [sec. 3.3]
  • [inference] The first-person narration of the opening (unique in the novel) is read as the interior self surfacing; the switch to first person at p. 851 marks the same waking. [sec. 3.1, sec. 5]
• Notes: Den Dulk explicitly brackets the plot cruxes he is displacing — "is Hal clinically depressed? Did he ingest the hallucinogen DMZ? Did he watch the film Infinite Jest" — as questions to which the novel "deliberately withholds a linear conclusion" (Boswell). The reading is offered as an alternative register (metaphor-made-literal), not as an answer inside the collapse-mechanism argument; his engagement with the ingestion question is recorded separately (below).

THEORY: The mold flashback / "call it something I ate" is not evidence Hal ingested DMZ

• Crux: hal-dmz
• Stance: complicates
• Evidence:
  • [text] "call it something I ate" is read as questioning "whether he’s referring to something particular he ingested" at all; the mold flashback is "exformation" — an unreliable gap (Orin-told, Hal does not recall it) — not a pharmacological clue (scene 001). [sec. 5, sec. 2]
  • [inference] Even granting the plot reading, den Dulk calls the endogenous-from-mold path "a possible (though highly unlikely) explanation for Hal’s ‘catatonic’ state thirteen years later". [sec. 2]
• Notes: Den Dulk grants the DMZ reading its pull ("it is tempting to read…") before setting it aside — the counterevidence he raises is against his own metaphor reading's rival, recorded cite-as-written. He does not adjudicate DMZ vs. withdrawal vs. Entertainment; he argues the plot frame is the wrong register.

THEORY: The childhood-mold flashback is exformation — a deliberately unreliable gap, told secondhand

• Crux: mold-significance
• Stance: mentions
• Evidence:
  • [text] The mold episode is narrated as something Hal "himself does not recall," "but was told by his notoriously unreliable brother Orin", functioning as a Kafka-esque "exformative" gap the reader tries to fill (scene 001). [sec. 2]
• Notes: Treated as a formal device, not a compositional stratum claim; the mold-significance cross-listing under composition is not den Dulk's concern.

THEORY: The Year-of-Glad admission-interview opening is a late addition, conceived to bind the novel's strands together

• Crux: late-additions
• Stance: endorses
• Evidence:
  • [draft] The opening "appeared relatively late in the development of the novel, namely in the “Typescript Draft” submitted in June 1994", with no earlier drafts of it in the archive; the conversationalist and Erdedy sections date to far earlier drafts (some possibly 1986), the May 1992 partial manuscript, and the Spring 1993 typescript. [sec. 2; WP containers]
  • [draft] Pietsch's June 1993 call for "lots more of Hal in extremis" and Moore's advice against the wild-and-funny conversationalist opening document the pressure that produced the new opening. [LB 3.2; SM 2.1]
• Notes: The strongest published genetic-criticism support for reading the Year-of-Glad opening as a late addition. Independently corroborated firsthand by the riles blog (see Cross-references), which reports the "First Two Sections" typescript not opening in Tucson/YoG.

THEORY: Hal's opening first-person narration is a deliberate design, marking his interior self surfacing

• Crux: hal-narration-drop
• Stance: endorses
• Evidence:
  • [text] "For most of the novel, Hal’s sections are narrated in" third person; "This changes on page 851, after Hal quits marijuana"; the opening (scene 001) is his only other first-person section, read as the interior self waking as withdrawal proceeds. [sec. 5, following Redgate]
• Notes: The standing question about this design concerns Hal's first person being abandoned for most of the novel; den Dulk reads the same fact from the other side (the first person is where the interior self is present). Same textual fact, read from the opposite end.

Themes

Communication and solipsism (Hal's bid to be acknowledged; fiction as disclosure); selfhood and self-deception (Gregor/Erdedy's reflective evasion vs. Hal's self-becoming); addiction (Erdedy's "cure himself by excess"); irony vs. sincerity (the "cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive" myth den Dulk traces from "E Unibus Pluram"); the role and risk of literature (the "hideously damaged infant" figure of "The Nature of the Fun"); composition and genesis.

Cross-references

• riles-in-dfw-archive-part1 — the firsthand HRC visit that independently reports the Year-of-Glad opening as a late addition and the "David"/1974 autobiographical conversationalist draft; the two accounts corroborate each other on the novel's genesis.
• gc-ep033-allard-den-dulk-philosophy and dfw19-den-dulk-keynote — den Dulk's existentialist framework in podcast and keynote form; this article applies it to IJ's opening.
• moore-first-draft-ij — Steven Moore's own account of the draft he read and advised on; den Dulk quotes Moore's marginal notes (SM 2.1) directly.
• The theories about what broke Hal and whether he ingested the DMZ — this is the criticism's fullest statement that the plot question is the wrong register, adjacent to the anti-closure readings of the ending.
• Scene anchors: scene 001 (admission interview + mold flashback, pp. 3-10), scene 004 (Erdedy, pp. 17-27), scene 005 (professional conversationalist, pp. 27-31).

Notable passages

• On genesis: Hal's admission interview "appeared relatively late in the development of the novel, namely in the “Typescript Draft” submitted in June 1994".
• Pietsch, June 1993: Hal is the "emotional core of the novel", and he "hoped “to see lots more of Hal in extremis”".
• Moore, on the conversationalist opening: "this is wild and funny, but rather too much so;" it "will give the reader the wrong idea of what kind of novel this is going to" be.
• Wallace on Kafka: a "radical literalization of truths we tend to treat as metaphorical".
• The thesis question: "what metaphor is literalized by Hal’s situation?"
• On the mold clue: "But note that Hal says “call it something I ate”".
• The conclusion: Hal "has taken up the task of self-becoming and symbolizes literary disclosure and communication", "rendering Infinite Jest as a redemptive novel".