MA Thesis on Infinite Jest, metafiction, and emotion (with creative component)

TL;DR

An MA thesis (hosted on The Howling Fantods, the long-running DFW fan/scholarship site) arguing that beneath its Pynchon/Gaddis-scale machinery, Infinite Jest is "at heart an attempt to emphasize the importance of emotion in contemporary literature." Reads IJ through Wallace's quarrel with John Barth — "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" and "E Unibus Pluram" as the keys to IJ's method — then closes with an original short story written to Wallace's prescription (a hybrid critical/creative thesis).

Key claims

• IJ must be read against Barth's "The Literature of Exhaustion" / "Lost in the Funhouse": in "Westward," Wallace uses metafiction against metafiction, exposing its recursive solipsism — metafiction "worships the narrative consciousness, makes it the subject of the text" (McCaffery interview).
• Barthian metafiction promises reader-author intimacy but delivers a one-sided relationship; the reader is locked out by a narrative consciousness obsessed with its own interpretation.
• The archer's-arrow analogy from "Westward" (Mark Nechtr wanting to write something "that stabs you in the heart") is Wallace's symbol for the fiction he wants: what matters is what happens to the arrow in flight — the shared experience between author and reader. Metafiction is the archer who never fires. "Out of the rubble, he creates Infinite Jest."
• Wallace doesn't discard metafiction in IJ; he quarantines it in the 388 endnotes, which disrupt the narrative and expose fiction as a mediated transaction without enthroning the narrative consciousness (only endnotes 117 and 119 ever address it).
• The creative component (a story about a dentist's accidentally sincere low-budget TV ad, featuring a patient named "Wallace" who admires that "somebody be himself on TV") dramatizes the thesis: ridicule-immunity through unguarded sincerity — a fictional demonstration of E Unibus Pluram's "anti-rebels."

Themes

Irony and metafiction; sincerity/emotion; entertainment and advertising; the author-reader relationship; endnotes as form.

Cross-references

• Endnote analysis complements identifying-stasis-venice (Letzler's "cruft") and entertainment-addiction-tartu (endnotes as engagement device).
• The single-entendre/anti-rebel material is the same ground contested in white-guys-new-sincerity and kelly-new-sincerity-reply.
• Relies heavily on Boswell — see boswell-understanding-dfw.

Notable passages

"It is at heart an attempt to emphasize the importance of emotion in contemporary literature."

"In 'Westward' Wallace uses metafiction to call attention to metafiction... ironically exposing its recursive and self-conscious nature."