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The Limits of the Infinite: The Use of Alcoholics Anonymous in Infinite Jest as a Narrative Solution after Postmodernism

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TL;DR

An Oberlin senior honors thesis (2001) arguing that Infinite Jest's use of Alcoholics Anonymous is not a subject but a narrative solution — Wallace's formal answer to the exhaustion of first-generation postmodernism. Its frame is a math metaphor Wallace himself uses: there is boundless infinity (endless rule-breaking, which Wallace finds "deadening") and there is bounded infinity (the infinite points inside a square — infinite possibility within limits). Where earlier postmodern fiction pursues the boundless, Wallace hunts for good bounded systems to work inside, and A.A. is the one he finds. Daverman walks the book's rival "narrative systems" — tennis, terrorism, television, therapy — showing each "found wanting" (well-formed but arbitrary; over-authoritarian; limitless and mute; success/failure and hierarchical), then argues A.A. alone satisfies the book's needs and comes to "dominate the text": non-hierarchical, resolution-less (the eternal present of Recovering), and built for Identification rather than Comparing. As Gately rises into A.A. narrative authority (winning even the showdown with the wraith), Hal and the other verbal virtuosos disintegrate. The twist in the tail: Wallace, by his own McCaffery admission, doesn't yet have the "courage" to write a fully A.A. book, so Infinite Jest only points to the solution — it is A.A.'s "first step," admitting the problem. Charles Tavis is read as the book's self-castigating dark mirror. A companion to the Raizman thesis (same year-ish, same A.A.-as-language material) but keyed to narrative form rather than Wittgenstein.

Key claims

  • The generational thesis. Against Theuwis (who dismisses Wallace's self-differentiation from postmodernism as "irrelevant"), Daverman argues the gap is "useful": Wallace is a second-generation postmodernist who wants "to assimilate the work of highly experimental postmodern precedents into more straightforward narratives" (quoting Chris Hager), but without the "cleveritis" Daverman says Hager's reading would pin on Wallace (Wallace's word, via McCaffery).
  • Bounded vs. boundless infinity (the organizing metaphor). "There are different kinds of infinities" — the boundless kind and "the kind of infinity within a boundary or set of limits" (infinite points in a square). Wallace seeks "bounded infinities" to work within rather than "attempting to create a boundless infinity". Anchored in Jim Incandenza's Cantorian-continuum reverie on match play (IJ p. 82) and Schtitt's "without [the boundary lines of the court] there is something bigger. Nothing to contain and give the meaning" (IJ p. 83 as Daverman's raw prints it — it omits "Lonely.", and the Theory-2 copy quotes the digest text; the raw spells the coach "Schitt"). Hal's nightmare of an infinitely complex court (IJ p. 67) is "the flipside" — the same infinity seen as meaningless.
  • A.A. as one narrative system among many — and the winner. "In the text, no character can stand alone; each is affiliated with a group that limits and orders the structure of his or her life." Tennis, terrorism, television, therapy are each disqualified: tennis is well-structured but its goal (winning) is "arbitrary"; terrorism diminishes the self too far (leg-severing initiations, U.S.O.U.S. humiliations); television is "limitless (and therefore uncontained and meaningless)" and one-way; therapy shares television's self-inflation and adds hierarchy and success/failure. "By the end of the book AA is the master narrative of Infinite Jest."
  • Marathe's "confusion of permissions" is the diagnosis. Marathe's speech (IJ pp. 319–320) — "Someone let your peoples forget it was the only thing of importance, choosing … And now there is no shelter" — is read as the book's succinct account of the disease: Americans have "too much unstructured freedom," the "lower bound of completely unstructured narrative," i.e. postmodernism.
  • A.A.'s form: Identifying, not Comparing. The distinctive A.A. narrative skill is Identifying (fusing with the speaker's story) versus Comparing (checking it against your own and rejecting difference). Because every A.A. story is "organized the same way," listeners with different lives can share one narrative arc. Once the book has "initiated the reader into AA," it "challenges the reader to Identify instead of Compare" — the stillborn-baby speaker (IJ pp. 376–379) is the exhibit.
  • A.A. is not irony. At an A.A. meeting the ironic, performing speaker is "transparently unfunny"; "A Boston AA is very sensitive to the presence of ego." A.A. form "attempts to be as unremarkable as possible". Infinite Jest keeps postmodern formal innovation but borrows from A.A. the rule that "narrative should have a purpose beyond itself" — Communication.
  • Gately gains narrative authority; the wraith showdown. Gately's two narrative showdowns — Joelle's grammatical challenge to "But For the Grace of God" (IJ p. 366), which nearly panics him back Out There, and the wraith of Jim, "a much more formidable opponent" whose thought-insertion is "a sort of lexical rape" (IJ p. 832). Gately wins the second by rejecting the wraith's non-A.A. self-pity ("Poor Me, Poor Me, Pour Me a Drink," IJ p. 839); the wraith "seemlessly disappears … without even an exit line" (sic — Daverman's spelling).
  • Hal disintegrates as Gately rises. Hal, Joelle, Jim — "skillful narrators" — "lose coherence as they reach crises that their narrative abilities can not cope with". Hal's opening incoherence is "chronologically the end" of his development; he outwits the Grief Therapist with library-derived narrative games (Dr. Rusk's counterphobia psychobabble, addressed to an unnamed student, is the thesis's separate exhibit of therapy-at-its-most-intellectual) but never uses a system to actually restructure himself.
  • A.A. as belief-free procedure. The Betty Crocker cake-mix parable (IJ p. 469): "It didn't matter one fuckola whether Gately like believed a cake would result … if you just followed the motherfucking directions … a cake would result." Unlike therapy, A.A. requires no belief or understanding — only short-term physical tasks and a "chilled conviction that you have no faith whatsoever left in yourself" (IJ p. 351). Non-hierarchical: "they can't kick you out" (IJ p. 352).
  • Tavis as the book's dark mirror; the "first step" reading. Charles Tavis's "pathological openness" — "about as seductive as Tourette's syndrome" (IJ p. 1048) — is a "self-reflexive key to Infinite Jest's maximalism," honesty-about-an-inability-to-be-honest that "causes the text to balloon out of all proportion." Finally, per McCaffery, Wallace admits he lacks the "courage" to write the fully communicative book; so Infinite Jest is A.A.'s "first step" — admitting the problem without yet solving it. "Over a thousand pages is not too long to work out that first step."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: A.A.'s narrative FORM — non-hierarchical, resolution-less (eternal present), Identifying-not-Comparing, purpose-beyond-itself — is the book's own formal/aesthetic solution to the exhaustion of postmodernism; Infinite Jest structurally mimics an A.A. meeting

  • Crux: aa-narrative-form (PROPOSED — see watch); supports ij-aa-love-letter, reading-as-rehab, book-as-entertainment
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] "By the end of the book AA is the master narrative of Infinite Jest."
    • [text] "There are seven complete AA narratives quoted at length in Infinite Jest, and a few more rendered indirectly" — each modeling the A.A. way to tell/ hear stories, which "becomes the Infinite Jest method of writing and reading literature."
    • [text] Identifying vs. Comparing (IJ pp. 345, 365 via author): once the book "has sufficiently initiated the reader into AA, it challenges the reader to Identify instead of Compare"; the reader "gets sucked in, which is to say the reader Identifies."
    • [text] Non-resolution reframed: A.A. narrative has "an eternal present of recovery," so the book's missing ending "has more in common with AA's narrative form" than with postmodern subversion; Gately's One-Day/One-Second withdrawal (IJ pp. 859–860) is the model.
    • [secondary] The McCaffery good-art/love credo (Wallace interview, RCF 13.2, quoted at its p. 150) supplies the "purpose beyond itself" criterion: art from "a part of yourself that love can instead of the part that just wants to be loved", "willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow."
  • Notes: The source's own limiting clause (counterevidence it raises): "Infinite Jest itself is not an AA narrative" — it "locates its perspective outside AA," Wallace "does not write in a fully communicative, meaningful, and emotional way," and by his McCaffery admission lacks the "courage" yet. So the thesis is deliberately A.A.-as-first-step, not A.A.-achieved. This is the central and most distinctive claim; PROPOSED because it is a formal reading (A.A.'s storytelling structure as the novel's method) distinct from the thematic love-letter/ seriousness slugs.

THEORY: Wallace's structural principle is BOUNDED infinity (infinite possibility within limits), which is what separates him from first-generation postmodernism's pursuit of boundless rule-breaking

  • Crux: annular-structure (support); bounded-infinity (PROPOSED watch)
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [author] Wallace's McCaffery statements: rule-breaking anarchy yields "toxicity"; "There's something about free play within an ordered and disciplined structure that resonates for readers. And there's something about complete caprice and flux that's deadening."
    • [text] Jim Incandenza's Cantorian match-play reverie (IJ p. 82): beauty as "expansion … a Cantorian continuum of infinities of possible move and response, Cantorian and beautiful because infoliating, contained … bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent".
    • [text] Schtitt, on the court's boundary lines: "Without there is something bigger. Nothing to contain and give the meaning. Lonely. Verstiegenheit." (IJ p. 83) — "The boundaries of tennis are like the form of fiction; they create possibilities by limiting."
    • [text] Hal's infinitely-complex-court nightmare (IJ p. 67) as "the flipside": the same infinity experienced as "meaningless complexity."
  • Notes: The math metaphor is explicitly attributed to Wallace's undergraduate math background. Distinct enough from annular-structure (macro-shape) to flag bounded-infinity as a watch, but NOT minted as a separate proposal — it reads as the design substrate under the A.A.-form thesis and the annular reading; record as an annular-structure support with the Cantorian passage as its anchor. (Pairs with Strong's math material only obliquely — Strong is about errors, Daverman about bounded infinity as design.)

THEORY: The wraith scene is a narrative-authority showdown — the wraith wields authorial power ("lexical rape"), and Gately's A.A.-trained rejection of the wraith's non-A.A. self-pity is the moment Gately takes over the book's narration

  • Crux: wraith-reality (functional-reading support); catatonic-hero
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] The wraith "explicitly has the power of an author" via thought-insertion, described as "not only creepy but somehow violating, a sort of lexical rape" (IJ p. 832).
    • [text] Gately "rejects the wraith's non-AA life story," recognizing "gross self-pity … As in the slogan 'Poor Me, Poor Me, Pour Me a Drink'" (IJ p. 839); the wraith then vanishes "without even an exit line".
    • [inference] "It is a key victory for Gately that is built upon in the frequent chapters chronicling his story that occur in the last hundred plus pages" — the narrative baton passes to Gately.
  • Notes: Reads the wraith less as a metaphysical question (is it real?) than as a contest of narrative systems (Jim's intellectual/authorial vs. Gately's A.A.); a functional companion to the archive's wraith-reality material rather than a reality-verdict. Pairs with the Hal-disintegrates/Gately-rises baton reading.

THEORY: Every rival "narrative system" in the book (tennis, terrorism, television, therapy) is deliberately shown to fail on one axis so that A.A. can satisfy all — this is the book's argumentative architecture

  • Crux: eta-aa-mirror (support); thematic (anti-therapy, anti-television)
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] Tennis: well-formed but its goal "winning, is arbitrary."
    • [text] Terrorism: "so authoritarian in their domination of the individual self that the importance of the group in AA is mild by comparison" — the "upper bound of highly structured narrative"; postmodernism (via Marathe) is the lower bound.
    • [text] Television: "a limitless (and therefore uncontained and meaningless) medium" that "does not allow for people to communicate" (InterLace's "appeals to an American ideology committed to the appearance of freedom," IJ p. 1031).
    • [text] Therapy: the Grief Therapist's success/failure game Hal games (IJ pp. 253–257); Kate's M.D. behind "glass" (IJ pp. 70–72); Dr. Rusk's psychobabble "counterphobia" speech to an unnamed student (IJ p. 550) — "complex and requires intelligence. Still, it is completely unhelpful."
    • [text] A.A. by contrast is "non-hierarchal reciprocal" (sic) — "they can't kick you out" (IJ p. 352) — its power "born … of a chilled conviction that you have no faith whatsoever left in yourself" (IJ p. 351); belief-free (Betty Crocker cake-mix, IJ p. 469).
  • Notes: The ETA/A.A. contrast is the same institutional pairing the archive tracks as eta-aa-mirror, but Daverman reads it as disqualification of the rivals rather than mirror-symmetry; the Dr. Rusk "counterphobia" quote (IJ p. 550) is the same passage Chapman cites for disordered agency — cite-as-written cross.

THEORY: Charles Tavis is the book's self-castigating dark mirror; Infinite Jest's maximalist bulk is "the difficulty of being honest about an inability to be honest," and the whole novel is A.A.'s "first step" — admitting the problem without solving it

  • Crux: book-as-entertainment (support); meta ij-as-purge / ij-as-step-work
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] Tavis's "pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's syndrome" (IJ p. 1048); his speech like "peeling his skull back and exposing his brain to you without any sort of warning or invitation" (IJ p. 521).
    • [inference] "Infinite Jest's length also arises out of the difficulty of being honest about an inability to be honest" — Tavis as one self-castigating meta-commentary among many.
    • [author] McCaffery: really good work "requires a kind of courage that I don't seem to have yet" — read as the book's own confessed shortfall.
    • [inference] "If Infinite Jest is the first step in a progression … just to realize that the goals are being fallen short of is important. Over a thousand pages is not too long to work out that first step."
  • Notes: This is the thesis's honest hedge — it refuses to call the book a finished A.A. narrative and reads its excess as symptomatic. Overlaps the archive's ij-as-step-work (writing IJ as working the steps) and ij-as-purge; logs as a support with the Tavis-as-dark-mirror reading as its distinctive contribution.

Themes

Addiction and recovery (A.A. as the book's formal center of gravity); communication and solipsism (Identifying vs. Comparing; the failure of every non-A.A. group to let peers connect); entertainment/irony (television's limitless mute spectatorship; A.A. as the anti-irony); form and freedom (bounded vs. boundless infinity; the "confusion of permissions"); metafiction/self-criticism (Tavis and the book's ballooning honesty); the self and its surrender (each group "limits and orders" the self — terrorism too much, television/therapy too little).

Cross-references

  • Direct companion to Raizman, "Call it Something I Ate" (drafted alongside this note): both read A.A. as a learned narrative/language that works by repetition and both quote Joelle's "But For the Grace of God" grammar objection (IJ p. 366); Raizman keys it to Wittgenstein's language-games, Daverman to narrative form.
  • "Identifying Stasis in Infinite Jest" (Venice) covers the same Identifying/ Comparing and repetition-as-ethics ground through Kierkegaard/Camus rather than a postmodernism-generations frame.
  • The anti-figurant film-style material (Jim's "egalitarian babble of figurantless crowds," IJ p. 835) connects to the figurant-design thread and to Raizman's and Stern's figurant readings.
  • Dr. Rusk's "counterphobia" speech (IJ p. 550) is shared verbatim with Chapman's clinical-agency reading — same passage, different lens.
  • Leans throughout on the McCaffery 1993 interview (the "good art/love/courage" credo and the "cat's-away-let's-play Dionysian revel" postmodernism metaphor).

Notable passages

Verbatim from the thesis (author's own prose unless tagged "(IJ, via Daverman)"). NOTE: the raw is encoding-corrupted (� for curly quotes/apostrophes/dashes); spans here are given ASCII-clean for readability; no span here should be treated as byte-verbatim.

  • "There are different kinds of infinities."
  • "By the end of the book AA is the master narrative of Infinite Jest."
  • "The opposite of Identifying is Comparing."
  • "A Boston AA is very sensitive to the presence of ego."
  • (IJ p. 900, via Daverman) "we are all dying to give ourselves away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately -- the object seemed incidental to the will to give oneself away, utterly."
  • (IJ p. 832, via Daverman) the wraith's thought-insertion: "not only creepy but somehow violating, a sort of lexical rape."
  • (Wallace to McCaffery, via Daverman) "To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow."

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