A Deep Insider's Elegiac Tribute: The Work of Don DeLillo in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

TL;DR

The single most thorough scholarly account of how Don DeLillo's fiction shaped Infinite Jest, and the article that puts Wallace's own words behind the long-suspected debt. Graham Foster reads IJ as a novel built on a "foundation of allusions," and argues that its Enfield Tennis Academy and its Eschaton set piece grow directly out of DeLillo's second novel End Zone (1972) — with Wallace's copy of DeLillo's Americana (1971) and his annotated Underworld typescript as further evidence of a career-long apprenticeship. Its headline contribution is archival: Foster quotes two Wallace letters to DeLillo held at the Harry Ransom Center in which Wallace admits, of the Eschaton material, a "rather uncomfortable debt" to End Zone, and pins the borrowed passage to End Zone's Chapter 29. Foster also reads IJ as a deliberate dramatization of Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence — the Incandenza father-son relationships staging Bloom's theory of poetic inheritance in reverse, with the father anxious about the son.

Key claims

The DeLillo–End Zone debt, in Wallace's own letters

• Wallace acknowledged the debt directly in a letter to DeLillo of 11 June 1992, written while IJ was in composition: a long thing he was in the middle of "owes a rather uncomfortable debt to certain exchanges between Gary Harkness and Major Staley in End Zone." Foster gives the surrounding sentence too — Wallace's account of how other writers' "voices and constructions" (Puig's, Paz's) "hang around in my head and get mixed up with other experiences and ideas and voices."
• In a follow-up letter of 15 July 1992, Wallace pinned the exact passage: "The relevant Harkness-Staley exchange in End Zone is in Chapter 29, which in my old Pocket paperback is pp. 180–185." In the same letter he worried the allusion might be "potentially piratical" and framed writing to DeLillo as "the Sicilian-type Respect of the prenominate gesture."
• The Eschaton set piece is Foster's "most overt allusion" to End Zone: both novels stage a paper war game run on cascading all-caps geopolitical acronyms. Foster sets the two pre-game situation reports side by side — End Zone's (p. 211: "It begins in the Sea of Japan. An AMAC destroyer of the Seventh Fleet…") against IJ's (p. 325: "A Russo-Chinese border dispute goes tactical over Sinkiang… the remorseless logic of game theory compels SOVWAR to go SACPOP") (scene 073).
• A further archival datum: the original coversheet Wallace sent his publisher with the first draft of IJ (headed "PRIVATE DOCUMENT: INTENDED ONLY FOR RETINAS OF PEOPLE TO WHOM IT'S EXPLICITLY SENT") carries a bibliography for the Eschaton scene naming six sources, DeLillo's End Zone among them (alongside Howard Anton's calculus text, R. B. Braithwaite on game theory, Hackett's The Third World War, Nash, and Raiffa).

The wider DeLillo apprenticeship

• DeLillo "haunts" the Wallace Papers. In Wallace's copy of Americana (1971), Foster reports margin notes for IJ's composition: Orin Incandenza's career as a serial seducer is plotted next to DeLillo's description of his protagonist's seduction technique (Americana 35).
• Wallace's annotation on the typescript of DeLillo's Underworld (1997) shows him reading DeLillo's prose at word level — he underlines "the crumbled husks of glassy green beetles" and notes "Allit. & Asson. Gives them a chant-like weight in your mind, a counterweight to flat tone."
• The End Zone allusions are itemized: DeLillo's sportscaster-in-training Raymond Toon becomes Jim Troeltsch; the taciturn football prodigy Taft Robinson becomes the taciturn tennis prodigy John "No Relation" Wayne; Hal's philosophizing "recalls End Zone's narrator, Harkness."

Infinite Jest as a dramatization of Bloom's Anxiety of Influence

• Foster argues IJ overtly stages Harold Bloom's theory of poetic influence. The clearest signpost: in James Incandenza's film Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms…, the lecturer Paul Anthony Heaven reads out Bloom's "Six Revisionary Ratios" verbatim ("clinamen and tessera… kenosis and daemonization… artistic askesis…", p. 911), and an endnote names the target: "Professor H. Bloom's turgid studies of artistic influenza" (n. 366) (scene 172).
• The father-son relationship dramatizes Bloom in reverse: in the "professional conversationalist" scene the ten-year-old Hal is sent to a disguised Jim, and it is the father who is anxious about his influence on the son (scenes p. 28–31; scene 005). Foster notes that this chapter's HRC draft title — "It Was a Great Marvel That They Were in the Father Without Knowing Him" (later the film's title in the Filmography, p. 992) — is the same Gospel of Truth line Bloom uses as the header to his Anxiety of Influence prologue.
• Foster grounds this in Wallace's own stated allegiance: quoting the Lipsky interview, "I believe in Harold Bloom's theory of misprision," so Wallace's allusions are "necessarily misreadings in the Bloomian sense" — deliberate, vitalizing revision of the precursor, not passive borrowing. He cites Boswell: "Incandenza is Pynchon, Barth, and Nabokov all rolled into one," and adds DeLillo (and Bloom himself) to that list of literary fathers.

The interpretive arc

• Foster frames the End Zone borrowing through the systems-novel tradition (Tom LeClair, via Bertalanffy; Charles Molesworth on the genre's "surplus of information"), reading both war games as attempts to impose rational systems on violence that the violence overwhelms.
• His reading of the two games diverges at the ending: in End Zone the war game yields Harkness "insights… minor revelations… Mythic images," a stately contemplation (via Cowart); in IJ the rules "cannot prevent humans' violent nature from revealing itself," and the game collapses into a real melee, culminating in referee Otis P. Lord plummeting head-first into the screen that holds the rules.
• Conclusion: Wallace's relationship to his predecessors matured across his career — from challenging Barth in "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" to embracing DeLillo in IJ, "engaging with its themes, and using it as inspiration to create something new."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Infinite Jest is built extensively on DeLillo's End Zone (and Americana), an influence Wallace acknowledged in his own correspondence

• Crux: delillo-influence
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [author] Wallace's letter to DeLillo, 11 June 1992: the Eschaton material "owes a rather uncomfortable debt to certain exchanges between Gary Harkness and Major Staley in End Zone." [End Zone, disp-quote]
  • [author] Wallace's follow-up letter, 15 July 1992: the passage is End Zone Chapter 29, "pp. 180–185" in his Pocket paperback; the allusion is "potentially piratical," written to DeLillo out of "the Sicilian-type Respect of the prenominate gesture." [End Zone]
  • [draft] The first-draft coversheet's Eschaton-scene bibliography names End Zone among six sources (with Anton, Braithwaite, Hackett, Nash, Raiffa). [End Zone, disp-quote]
  • [draft] Margin notes in Wallace's copy of Americana plot Orin's serial-seducer arc next to DeLillo's protagonist's seduction technique (Americana 35); Wallace's Underworld-typescript annotation ("Allit. & Asson…"). [End Zone opening]
  • [secondary] The itemized allusion catalogue (Toon→Troeltsch, Robinson→John Wayne, Harkness→Hal) and the side-by-side pre-game situation reports (End Zone 211 / IJ 325). [End Zone]
• Notes: Foster treats the influence as acknowledged and creative, not anxious or concealed — Wallace "avoids any accusations of plagiarism" by intending the allusions to be seen (Ricks's alluder/plagiarist distinction). The archival [draft] claims rest on Foster's own HRC reading; no reproduction of the documents is given beyond the quoted spans. No in-source denial or counter-tension is raised against the debt.

THEORY: Infinite Jest deliberately dramatizes Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence, with DeLillo among the literary "fathers"

• Crux: delillo-influence
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [text] Paul Anthony Heaven's lecture in JOI's film reproduces Bloom's "Six Revisionary Ratios" verbatim (p. 911), flagged by the endnote naming "Professor H. Bloom's turgid studies of artistic influenza" (n. 366). [Influence and Allusion; scene 172]
  • [text] The "professional conversationalist" scene (p. 28–31) reverses Bloom: the father is anxious about influencing the son. The chapter's HRC draft title = Bloom's Anxiety of Influence prologue header (from the Gospel of Truth). [Influence and Allusion; scene 005]
  • [author] Lipsky interview: "I believe in Harold Bloom's theory of misprision." [Influence and Allusion]
  • [secondary] Boswell: "Incandenza is Pynchon, Barth, and Nabokov all rolled into one," extended by Foster to include DeLillo and Bloom.
• Notes: Foster's Bloom reading is offered as the interpretive frame that organizes all the novel's paternal-filial and literary-inheritance material, DeLillo included; recorded here keyed to delillo-influence (whose registry entry is already the "Bloomian response-frame"), with the Bloom-specific angle noted for the audit's routing call. No counter-reading raised in-source.

THEORY: The Eschaton set piece is a substantive mutation of DeLillo's war-game theme, not a pointless comic interlude

• Crux: eschaton-function
• Stance: rejects
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] Foster reads Eschaton through the systems-novel tradition (LeClair, Molesworth): a rational system of rules imposed on violence that the violence overwhelms — "the rules, cerebral and complex though they are, are merely an illusion that cannot prevent humans' violent nature from revealing itself." [End Zone]
  • [text] The game's collapse into a real melee and the symbolic disposal of referee Otis P. Lord (head-first into the screen holding the rules) are read as the thematic point, following Bresnan (the melee "a much more accurate 'simulation' of war than the game itself"). [End Zone]
• Notes: Foster does not argue the "pure comic set piece" reading; he reads Eschaton as doing serious thematic work (the futility of systems against primal violence). This puts him on the substantive-function side of the eschaton-function question — a scholarly (secondary) witness alongside the counter-side cluster already logged in the registry. The genesis/debt half (that Eschaton takes its form from the End Zone war game) is the delillo-influence block above, per the sister note's routing. No grade/fold performed here.

Themes

Literary influence and lineage (DeLillo as IJ's formal father; Bloom's anxiety of influence dramatized) · the war game as sport/violence analogy (Eschaton and the Harkness–Staley game) · the "systems novel" and the futility of rational order against primal violence · composition history and the archive (the coversheet bibliography, the Americana margins, the DeLillo correspondence) · paternal-filial relationships in the Incandenza family.

Cross-references

• dfwwords-enfield-end-zone — the fan-blog catalogue of the same End Zone/ETA parallels; Foster is the peer-reviewed, archive-grounded counterpart, and supplies the primary letters the blog only attests secondhand.
• hrc-letters-1995-rcm-scans — the other Wallace–DeLillo correspondence (the October 1995 page-proofs letter); Foster quotes from the earlier 1992 letters in the same DeLillo Papers folder.
• The Eschaton war game (scene 073); the professional-conversationalist scene (scene 005); Paul Anthony Heaven's Bloom lecture in Good-Looking Men… (scene 172).

Notable passages

• On the debt (Wallace to DeLillo, 11 June 1992): a long thing he was mid-way through "owes a rather uncomfortable debt to certain exchanges between Gary Harkness and Major Staley in End Zone."
• On the exact locus (Wallace to DeLillo, 15 July 1992): "The relevant Harkness-Staley exchange in End Zone is in Chapter 29, which in my old Pocket paperback is pp. 180–185."
• On the risk (same letter): the allusion may be "potentially piratical"; writing to DeLillo shows "the Sicilian-type Respect of the prenominate gesture."
• The Eschaton bibliography coversheet header: "PRIVATE DOCUMENT: INTENDED ONLY FOR RETINAS OF PEOPLE TO WHOM IT'S EXPLICITLY SENT."
• On DeLillo's prose (Wallace's Underworld-typescript note): "Allit. & Asson. Gives them a chant-like weight in your mind, a counterweight to flat tone."