IJ study archive

A Reader's Companion to Infinite Jest

source

Full-text note from the archived PDF (Xlibris, 2005, 319 pp; ISBN 1-4134-8446-8). Dowling (Rutgers) and Bell (Williams) are 18th-century and Joyce scholars respectively; the book is self-published and reads like it — no professional editing, almost no critical apparatus (the endnotes, p. 317, cite essentially Burn 2003 and one Birkerts review). The earliest book-length companion after Burn's 1st edition, aimed squarely at first-time readers. Reputation uneven, and deservedly so — assessed concretely below — but its scene-by-scene precis and its dictionaries cover ground every other guide in the archive skims.

TL;DR

A hand-holding companion for readers intimidated by the novel: ten chapters moving from a walkthrough of the opening episode through explainers (Subsidized Time, the four master settings, the samizdat/Québec/veil/Eschaton plot machinery), a 60-page compendium of 12 major characters, a full scene-by-scene plot precis with IJ page ranges (pp. 152–208) — a crude ancestor of the archive's own scene catalog — a themes chapter, and three reference dictionaries (minor characters & real people, acronyms, slang). Critically it is the anti-Burn: it refuses to date YDAU (and bungles the hints it does give), takes no position on the ending or the Hal-DMZ question, and instead floats a reading found nowhere else in the archive — that the geopolitical plot, the Entertainment, the AFR, and possibly Orin himself may be one "single sustained hallucination". Its strong suit is moral-thematic close reading (Dowling's smiley-face essay, the veil/acknowledgment discussion); its weak suit is exactly what the archive's live debates are about.

Structure and method

  • Preface (pp. 9–11): mission statement — don't be the reviewer who gave up on p. 1; the book's difficulty mirrors a fragmented world ("a hell for one"); Humpty Dumpty figure for the novel's reassembly of the broken self. Tone problem visible from the start: readers who find IJ too difficult "wrongly imagine that the problem is with the novel rather than with themselves" (p. 11).
  • Ch. 1 (pp. 13–18): the opening episode decoded — Hal's "nervous breakdown," or rather the possibility "that the world may be psychotic" (p. 13); the acronym habit as survival tactic; and the framing claim that the whole novel is "a single gigantic flashback" hung on the hospital worker's "So yo then man what's your story?" (IJ 17) — "[w]ith the hospital worker's question, Infinite Jest as a narrative properly begins" (pp. 17–18).
  • Ch. 2 (pp. 19–31): Subsidized Time explained for civilians (frog-in-the-pot parable, bowl-game sponsorship riff); Gentle as Howard Hughes + Reagan + Bush's "Read my lips" (pp. 23–25); ends by planting the "missing year" between YDAU and the Year of Glad as "one of the keys" (pp. 30–31).
  • Ch. 3 (pp. 32–65): four master settings — ETA (with the Schtitt/Lyle/Mario "mystical" inner school), Ennet House (the Disease/despair theology, Crocodiles), the Arizona Outcropping (read as a Greek-tragedy Chorus; the freedom-vs-choice debate well summarized, pp. 51–58, incl. Steeply's father and MAS*H), and metro Boston as anatomical overlays down to the yrstruly/Poor Tony street level.
  • Ch. 4 (pp. 66–90): "Keys to Narrative Structure" — the Samizdat (and its possible unreality), Québec separatism, Madame Psychosis/the veil, and a genuinely good Eschaton explainer (map-vs-territory via spilled coffee on Virginia and flag-burning, pp. 88–89).
  • Ch. 5 (pp. 91–151): major-character compendium — Gately, Joelle, Hal, Avril, JOI, Orin, Mario, Charles Tavis, Lyle, Pemulis, Lenz, Poor Tony. (No Marathe/Steeply/Kate Gompert entries; the Outcropping pair got ch. 3.)
  • Ch. 6 (pp. 152–208): the precis — every section from IJ 3 to 981 in order, with page ranges, locations, and (usually) Subsidized dates. Sampled against our own scene chronology the dates check out (242–58 = 5 Nov ✓, 258–70 = 6 Nov ✓, attaché 1–2 Apr YDAU ✓, Stice window 18 Nov ✓, exhibition 20 Nov ✓) with one howler (below). This is the part that covers stretches other guides skim: full walkthroughs of yrstruly/C/Dr. Wo, Tiny Ewell's Money-Stealers' Club, the Kevin Bain Inner-Infant meeting, Lenz's nightly walks, the Molly Notkin OUS debriefing, the State-House "Fully Functional Phil" ad meeting, Barry Loach, and the whole Fackelmann endgame.
  • Ch. 7 (pp. 209–230): themes & techniques in titled mini-essays — personal identity ("What am I"), polyphony/parallax, encyclopedism/"word-inflation", footnotes, "Halations" (supernatural), tonal key-shifting, "unhip earnestness", home epic, self-reflexivity, anticonfluence, reflective vs. reflexive systems, circularity — capped by Dowling's "Reading the Smiley Face" (pp. 223–230).
  • Ch. 8 (pp. 231–293): alphabetical dictionary of minor characters and real people (E. A. Abbott to the end), with lifespan dates and IJ page cites — researched largely by Bell's student Heather Pierce (acks, p. 315). The real-people glosses are encyclopedia-brief (Adorno, Agnew, Alda, Amherst, Sidney Peterson...), but nothing else in the archive glosses every historical name in one place except wallacewiki.
  • Ch. 9 (pp. 294–307): acronym dictionary, 2R to (presumably) Z, with IJ page cites. Ch. 10 (pp. 308–310): slang & idioms (Bob Hope, demapped, kertwang, map, Item, jonesing...).
  • Afterword "Invitatio ad lectores" (pp. 311–313): frames IJ with Ulysses and Pale Fire as puzzle-books that summon reading communities; openly admits unsolved cruxes and solicits reader letters — what ATHSCME expands to, what "Mokus" means, and "how Don Gately and Hal Incandenza know about each other's existence when, to all appearances, they have no mutual acquaintances and have never met" (p. 313). "Since only one of us is on e-mail, we ask readers to contact us through the regular U.S. mail." The division of labor is given here: Dowling wrote chs. 1–4, the Gately and Joelle sketches, and the smiley-face essay; Bell the rest.

Key claims

Chronology — refuses the mapping, and muffs it (pp. 19–31)

  • Their official position is that translating Subsidized years into Gregorian ones misses the point: "you will feel a temptation to translate the years of Subsidized Time into their 'normal' equivalents... For a number of reasons, it's probably best to resist this temptation" (p. 28). Defensible as pedagogy, but the examples they drop are wrong on the novel's own evidence: Subsidized Time begins in "the year 2000" (p. 21) and the Year of the Whopper is glossed "as 2001, for instance" (p. 28) → YDAU = 2008, YG = 2009. Conflicts with Burn's derivation (riots note, IJ 987n24 + 996n60) and with the archive's chronology rulings (YW = 2002, YDAU = 2009, YG = 2010).
  • Worse, the book is incoherent with itself: the character entries presuppose Burn's mapping — JOI born 1950, dead at "fifty-four" on April Fool's Day YTSDB (pp. 116–117) puts YTSDB = 2004 and hence YW = 2002; Hal "born in 1992" (p. 104) only works with YDAU = 2009 — and endnote 6 (p. 317) cites the very pages of Burn 2003 where YDAU = 2009 is derived. They read the proof and printed a different number anyway.
  • Agreements worth logging: JOI's suicide 1 April YTSDB (pp. 33, 117 — matches Burn and digest); the dramatized action runs 1960 BS → YDAU with YG only in the frame (pp. 30–31); ETA "in operation for eight subsidized and three unsubsidized years" as of YDAU (p. 35, where they compute the founding as "1998").

The ending and the Hal–Gately crux — institutional agnosticism

  • No theory of the ending is offered anywhere in 319 pages. The Year of Glad Hal is a "nervous breakdown"/psychosis case continuous with the marijuana-withdrawal arc; the DMZ is introduced only as "one of the ongoing mysteries of plot" (p. 40) and is never connected to Hal's YG condition. The mold is retold twice (pp. 110–111, 224–225) with no etiological use. The AFR's plan to acquire "members of the immediate family of the auteur" (the novel's own wording, IJ 845) is summarized in the precis as "'acquiring' members of the Auteur's immediate family" (pp. 196), Wayne is identified as "probably" the AFR's student asset inside ETA (p. 184, on IJ 726), and the Master is located "if the Entertainment really does exist, in the Cimetière du St. Adelbert in L'Islet Province, Quebec (1030)" (p. 73) — i.e., they lay out every piece of Burn's AFR-capture reading and never assemble it.
  • The grave-dig (IJ 17 ↔ 934) is treated not as a plot event but as a psychic puzzle — "the puzzle of how Hal Incandenza and Don Gately... can have somehow have tuned in to a shared dream" (pp. 73–74) — and the Hal entry shrugs: "Whatever this signifies about the connection between Don Gately and Hal — some meeting between them, perhaps in the hospital during the 'missing year,' or some mystical communion between their spirits —" (p. 110). The Afterword then lists the Hal/Gately connection as an open problem and asks readers to mail in solutions (p. 313). Contrast: Burn (AFR capture "most likely", grave-dig real, Wayne standing watch as insurgent asset) and the archive's own reading, which treats the dig as a real YG event.
  • Hal's entry ends in deliberate stasis: "the story of Hal ends in stasis... The rest is silence" (p. 110), with hope pinned only on "slight signs and marginal movement."

The hallucination hedge — this book's one original big swing

  • Recurring, escalating suggestion that the thriller plot may not be real inside the fiction: "There are insistent signs throughout the story that many scenes may belong to a single long hallucination only distantly related to a 'real' reality as that seems to be visible beneath the fantasy of Subsidized Time and Johnny Gentle Famous Crooner and Quebecois Separatism" (pp. 67–68). The Entertainment may be "nothing more than a monstrous urban legend, confected out of French theory... and the sort of glib Cultural Studies chatter" (pp. 72–73); the AFR "may be mythical rather than real, a kind of dark compensatory projection" (p. 77, via the Struck-plagiarizes- Day endnote); Orin's torture scene "belong[s] less to the main narrative than to the hallucinatory reality that replaces it at the end" (p. 131); Joelle's hospital visits "may or may not be real" (p. 103).
  • Most extreme form, in the Joelle entry: since the "Orin sections" are absorbed into Hal's consciousness, "we will be compelled to ask to what degree his brother Orin is, or has been throughout, little more than a figment of Hal's own diseased imagination" (p. 99). Found nowhere else in the archive; the archive and every other guide treat Orin and the AFR plot as real. The hedge conveniently excuses them from every hard plot question.

Hamlet and the wraith (pp. 34, 96–97, 124–125, 194–196, 217)

  • Standard scaffolding, competently stated, nothing structural: title from the graveyard scene; JOI as the ghost of Hamlet's father ("absent presence"); Avril/Gertrude via Orin's Oedipal lens (p. 38 of ch. 3 section, pp. 111–112); CT as "interloping usurper" in "an intriguing, creepy reenactment of Hamlet" (p. 111); "Prince Hal"; Poor Yorick Productions; Hal's "never once doubts the reality of the ghost" flagged as false to the play but true to Hal (p. 200 precis / p. 109). Agrees with our structure-and-hamlet note's baseline; no Burn-style Ulysses two-narrative engine, no ritual calendar, no section-count claims at all.
  • The wraith is taken seriously as more than fever: "The Wraith is not, or not simply, a hallucination", and "[t]hat the Wraith is independent of Don and somehow 'real' is suggested by the fact that it speaks words Don doesn't recognize" (pp. 124–125) — the ghostwords argument, the same evidence the archive and the fan ending-theories use. The figurant discourse is correctly applied to the novel's own polyphony (p. 125).

Character readings worth keeping

  • Gately as Arthurian knight: the Sir Osis of Thuliver mishearing read as "an early glimpse of the core of Gately's moral character" (pp. 93–94); Knight Errand/Pamela Hoffman-Jeep; the street brawl as sick fantasy ("eulogized at great length in bold-faced Globe print", IJ 611) become real chivalry (p. 96); Hercules furens for the berserk rages (p. 94 — Burn has the Heracles myth-overlay independently and more fully).
  • Joelle's veil, both ways (pp. 80–84, 100–103): the question is kept open deliberately, but they assemble the best case in the archive that the disfigurement is figurative — Lenz's cyclops story is coke-chatter; Molly Notkin's acid narrative "bears every sign of having been made up to account for the veil"; Gately sees a perfectly regular chin and mouth; and the Blood Sister filmography credit puts the burn-scarred-face role under "Marla-Dean Chumm," not Madame Psychosis (pp. 101–102). Framed via The Medusa and the Odalisque, "acteonizing" beauty, and Stanley Cavell's acknowledgment — perfect beauty and hideous deformity pose the same failure to acknowledge the person (p. 83). The "I'm so beautiful I drive anybody with a nervous system out of their fucking mind" speech is read as possibly ironic, possibly a stock deflection learned from JOI's Medusa-Odalisk joke (IJ 940; pp. 83–84).
  • A unique identification: the "epicene" figure Joelle sees in the revolving door of the Entertainment is ID'd as Stokely "Dark Star" McNair, the prostitute from Accomplice!, with the nickname decoded via IJ 685 (pp. 71–72). Nowhere else in the archive.
  • Avril gets the fairest hearing of any guide we hold (pp. 110–116): Orin's "wicked witch" is methodically discounted (the Pemulis-walks-in tableau — cheerleader outfit, jockstrap and helmet — noted as staging Orin and Joelle's own meeting, hence likely fantasy, p. 112), Mario's and Marlon Bain's testimony weighed, and she's compared to Caddy Compson — "the composite construction of others" (p. 116). No Luria/AFR-mole suspicion at all (contrast wallacewiki/fan readings); their ch. 8 Luria Perec entry makes her DuPlessis's and Tine's double-amanuensis and Orin's Swiss hand-model but draws no Avril link.
  • Pemulis: they emphasize (correctly, citing IJ 1073) that the Wayne-dosing "had been a total accident and in no way Pemulis's deal" (p. 191) — Troeltsch had filched the Tenuates — a point fan summaries often get wrong.
  • The yrstruly narrator is argued ≠ Lenz despite both self-identifying as "yrstruly" (p. 148) — a small original observation.

Dowling's "Reading the Smiley Face" (pp. 223–230)

  • A model close-reading thread, unique to this book as an assembled chain: the Nice-Day smile-faces on toddler Hal's slippers in Orin's endnote version of the mold story (IJ 1042) → the "vapid U.S.A.-type circular smiling heads" embossed on the samizdat cartridges and the smiley-face mailer → the Sergeant at Arms's "plain yellow smiley-face circle" mask in Gately's vaudeville-hook dream (IJ 359) → the AFR hit-squad leader's "worst mask of all" at the Antitoi shop (IJ 486). The smiley face becomes the Disease's and Death's face — "the demonic visage of the Samizdat itself" — and the book's verdict on the culture: "Its theme is not the banality of evil but the evil of banality" (p. 230).

Other distinctive identifications and frames

  • Enfield = the drowned Quabbin town: real Enfield, MA was flooded for the Quabbin Reservoir; Underwood's Quabbin (1893) flagged as the literary portrait of it; the "Quabbin Recovery Systems" building where Hal finds the teddy-bear meeting read as the joke's payoff (p. 35). Nowhere else in the archive (Infinite Atlas handles the real Enfield-as-Brighton geography instead).
  • Johnny Gentle's germophobia sourced to Howard Hughes in detail (pp. 24–25), alongside Reagan and "no new enhancements"/read-my-lips.
  • "Reflective vs. Reflexive Systems" (the conference where JOI met Avril, IJ 64) taken as the novel's own aesthetic key — Wallace balancing world-making against postmodern reflexivity, "apres-garde" defined as vaulting back over postmodernism to traditional storytelling roots (pp. 221–222, 229).
  • "Halations" (IJ 97) read as a pun on Hal's name and the label for the novel's supernatural register (pp. 216–217); the narrator as Joycean "Arranger" (p. 213, Bell's Ulysses criticism showing); inside/outside as the master dichotomy down to "INfiNite" (p. 212).
  • Eschaton's meaning located in the map/territory dispute, with the spilled-coffee-on-Virginia and flag-burning analogies (pp. 88–90) — the clearest lay explanation of that crux in the archive.

Errors and weaknesses (assessing the "uneven reputation")

  • Self-published with no editorial control. Beyond constant typos (impossible to fully separate from the PDF's bad OCR, but "Kate Gombert," "Tiny Elwell," "Dialalud," "Incendenza," and "Antonio Artaud" for Antonin are in the text layer), there are hard factual errors:
    • The Notkin party / Joelle's overdose (IJ 219–240) is dated "December 7, YDAU" (p. 161) — impossible (the YDAU narrative ends 20 Nov; the scene is 7 Nov, I-Day eve, as their own adjacent entries for 5 and 6 Nov imply, and as the archive's scenes 058–062 rule).
    • Avril "Born in 1953" yet "in the YDAU... Avril is 53 years old" (p. 111) — arithmetic that fails under any mapping of YDAU (2006?).
    • The ch. 2 chronology (start 2000, Whopper 2001) vs. the ch. 5 character dates (JOI 1950/d. 54 in YTSDB; Hal b. 1992) — two incompatible timelines in one book, with Burn's correct derivation sitting cited in their own endnotes.
    • Mario "born 1991 BS" twelve lines before "his nineteenth birthday approaches on November 25 [YDAU]" (pp. 132, 134) — though the novel itself wobbles on Mario's birthday (see Burn's appendix concession).
    • Smaller slips: Erdedy's episode called "narrated by Ken Erdedy" (p. 211 — it's close third person); the opening ER sequence framed as Hal's memory of an episode "almost exactly a year ago" (p. 17 — the novel renders it as present/anticipated); Hal "eating some basement fungus when he was four" (p. 224) vs. "as a five-year-old" (p. 110).
  • Method weaknesses: no engagement with the endnotes as structure (no section counts, no n.24 filmography mining beyond two films, no n.110 treatment); no use of the novel's dating notes for chronology; the hallucination hedge and the Afterword's reader-mail outsourcing let them duck every adjudicable question; "not going to spoil" deferrals recur even in a book whose ch. 6 is a complete spoiler precis.
  • Tonal/ideological thumb on the scale: the novel is flattened into an anti-consumerist moral allegory (we have "all been turned into cartoon characters, two-dimensional people, by a world in which people no longer have souls," p. 20; the frog-in-the-pot, pp. 20–21), with culture-war asides imported as if they were Wallace's — sneers at "Dworkinite" feminists (p. 81), "psychobabble 'therapies' and the degraded mythology of recovered memory syndrome" (p. 42), Deleuze/Cultural Studies (pp. 72–73), and a closing fantasy of Americans learning to answer "Have a nice day" with "a shudder" (p. 230). The preface's "problem is with the novel rather than with themselves" condescension (p. 11) is the book's reputation in one line.
  • Verdict for this archive: cite it as (a) a second scene-by-scene reference whose dates and page ranges are usually sound (sampled clean against the archive's own chronology except the Dec 7 error), (b) the dictionaries (real people, acronyms, slang), and (c) the handful of unique readings above (smiley face, Quabbin, McNair, Chumm/veil, hallucination hedge as a documented position). Do not cite it on chronology, the ending, or anything requiring endnote mechanics — Burn and the archive outrank it everywhere they overlap.

Themes

Addiction/despair theology (the Disease, Crocodiles, Gately's prayer-without-belief — their strongest expository pages); entertainment and the self (Samizdat as pure self-gratification atop the pyramid of solitary pleasures; MAS*H; the smiley face); communication/solipsism (acknowledgment via Cavell; the veil; figurants; "I am in here"); family/Hamlet (fathers and sons "justifying one's seed", pp. 117–119); Québec separatism as moral contempt for U.S. vapidity; irony vs. the irony-free zone; identity/polyphony.

Cross-references

Notable passages

All page cites above and below are the book's own printed pagination (visible in the PDF text layer); its IJ cites use the canonical 1079-page pagination, fully compatible with our anchors.

"[Y]ou will feel a temptation to translate the years of Subsidized Time into their 'normal' equivalents: the Year of the Whopper as 2001, for instance... For a number of reasons, it's probably best to resist this temptation." (p. 28)

"There are insistent signs throughout the story that many scenes may belong to a single long hallucination only distantly related to a 'real' reality as that seems to be visible beneath the fantasy of Subsidized Time and Johnny Gentle Famous Crooner and Quebecois Separatism." (pp. 67–68)

"[W]e will be compelled to ask to what degree his brother Orin is, or has been throughout, little more than a figment of Hal's own diseased imagination." (p. 99)

"Whatever this signifies about the connection between Don Gately and Hal — some meeting between them, perhaps in the hospital during the 'missing year,' or some mystical communion between their spirits — Gately's vision conveys the centrality of Hal's consciousness in Infinite Jest... The rest is silence." (p. 110)

"If you've... solved any of the puzzles that have left us in a quandary — e.g., what ATHSCME translates into... or have convincing and detailed solutions to major problems in narrative structure — e.g., how Don Gately and Hal Incandenza know about each other's existence... we invite you to communicate them to us." (p. 313)

"At this point, the smiley face becomes the demonic visage of the Samizdat itself... Its theme is not the banality of evil but the evil of banality." (pp. 229–230)

"The lonely personal hell of Infinite Jest is the prison the self or ego becomes when you take it to be the only possible reality." (p. 45)