Irony, Narcissism, and Affect: A Study of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

TL;DR

A psychoanalytic MA thesis arguing that the standard critical move in Wallace studies — finding some affective "x" (sincerity, empathy, community) that triumphs over irony — has reached a stalemate. Instead, IJ's characters are caught in a double-bind between isolation (ironic-narcissistic distance) and engulfment (psychotic, total pain), which they can only mitigate, never resolve. Strong chapter-length readings of each Incandenza.

Key claims

• The "x over irony" paradigm (post-Boswell/Kelly criticism) misreads the novel as offering interpersonal-affective resolutions; Wallace's critique of irony is really a critique of irony's narcissistic uses (irony as secondary-narcissistic defence that "gets us up above" others).
• Kate Gompert's distinction (IJ p. 695) between anhedonia (emptying the self of the possibility of pain) and psychotic depression (embodiment of that pain) maps the two poles of the double-bind: isolating distance vs. engulfing excess closeness.
• Ch. 2: James Incandenza is the key figure of the isolating trajectory — the ironic artist, "empty inside, utterly, a vacuum," whose paternal insufficiency transmits the defence to his sons.
• Ch. 3: Avril embodies the engulfment threat — the narcissistic mother who "evokes a psychotic threat for the characters" on "the maternal, psychotic pole of the bind," read via the abject; her hyper-attentive love is the smothering counterpart to James's absence.
• Ch. 4: Hal (dissolution) and Orin (control) demonstrate the two failure modes of the inherited narcissistic subjectivity; the boys "seem stuck between the two-sided enigma of the Moms as loving parent and horrific enigma." Woodend's own section heading for the predicament — "Stuck between two things" — borrows the novel's p. 647 line ("trapped in some sort of middle. Between two things").
• Conclusion: characters mitigate the two-sided affective threat in singular ways rather than transcending it — the novel withholds the redemptive synthesis critics keep finding in it.

Themes

Irony; depression and anhedonia; family (the Incandenza psychodrama); solipsism and communication; addiction as defence mechanism.

Cross-references

• Hal's catatonic/expressive crisis in the Year of Glad opening; Orin's Subjects; Avril's scenes with Mario; Kate Gompert and Geoffrey Day at Ennet House; Brief Interviews #72 (cited for the ironic-male type).
• Diagnoses the same critical paradigm that white-guys-new-sincerity attacks politically and kelly-new-sincerity-reply defends.
• Complements the stasis framing in identifying-stasis-venice (paralysis between poles rather than progress).

Notable passages

"[I]solation and engulfment form an affective double-bind in the novel that characters mitigate in singular ways." (Abstract)

"I argue that a narcissistically operative irony isolates Infinite Jest's characters from interpersonal affectivity, but, at the same time, protects them from an engulfment threat." (Abstract)