IJ study archive

The Fact of the Cage: Reading and Redemption in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

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TL;DR

The most recent book-length study devoted entirely to Infinite Jest (Burn's Reader's Guide and Carlisle's Elegant Complexity are the earlier two), and the one that reads it as a religious as well as a literary achievement. Plank — a professor of religious studies — argues the novel dramatizes a single predicament, encagement (addiction, depression, emotional deadness, lethal entertainment, and the "skull-sized kingdom" of self-consciousness), and then shows how a few of its characters contend with and briefly break out of the cage: by "Abiding" (a disciplined attention to the present moment, kin to the tennis players' flow), and by relational acts that defy isolation — speaking and hearing in the AA rooms, the "revelation of faces" (unveiling), and touch. The theological payoff is the "boneless Christ": Don Gately, gunshot and refusing narcotics in his hospital bed, is a figure at once needing help and giving it, and Joelle van Dyne wiping his face is cast as the Veronica of that Passion. Plank's wager, stated openly, is that reading such a novel is itself redemptive — not through any "lesson drawn" or "moral idea" but through "the full experience of reading the thousand-page plus novel" which pushes the reader off the page and back into the world where connection is possible. It is the fullest theological/ethical reading of the novel in print, and the single richest development of the redemption-through-reading and Gately-as-Christ strands.

Key claims

  • The title is a reading key. Plank takes his title from Lyle, the E.T.A. weight-room guru: "You might consider how escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage" (IJ 389). The whole novel is read as a "near-documentary of the human wreckage" whose characters "share the ordeal of being encaged in a wide array of forms" their captivity compounded by a denial that "forges its own iron bars"; awareness of the cage is the first step of any jailbreak (Lyle's line is in scene 082).
  • Reading Infinite Jest can make one better — the ethics-of-fiction thesis. Chapter 1 grounds the book in Wallace's own stated purposes (writing as communication not self-expression; fiction as "an anodyne against loneliness"; fiction as portraying "what it is to be a fucking human being"; narrative as "redemptive") and in the ethical-criticism tradition of Wayne Booth, Henry James, and Martha Nussbaum. Getting better "is not a matter of the lesson drawn or any moral idea, but is a matter of the full experience of reading the thousand-page plus novel." Plank opens with the recovery-community testimony of Leslie Jamison (The Recovering) and the "Infinite Summer" blogger "infinitedetox," who said the novel "made [him] want to be a better person."
  • The novel is a work of the "new sincerity" / post-postmodernism. Following Boswell ("a nervous member of some still-unnamed...third wave of modernism") and Adam Kelly, Plank places IJ past both modernism and the postmodern irony Wallace glossed as "learning to love the cage"; sincerity is aligned with Ricœur's "hermeneutics of belief" / "second naïveté" against the "hermeneutics of suspicion."
  • The "failed entertainment" is the novel's rhetorical engine. Because IJ depicts the lethal danger of immersive entertainment (the fatal cartridge), it cannot justly capture its own reader in a comparable immersion; it must exert a "centrifugal" force that pushes the reader "off and beyond the page" If the desire it kindles does not "spill over into the reader’s world, the novel will have failed...it will have failed to fail, to succeed as a failed entertainment" (working subtitle, A Failed Entertainment; drawing on Frank Cioffi and Toon Staes).
  • Encagement has many bars (Chapter 2). Enclosed spaces in the novel are ambiguous (refuge and prison at once), and cage-imagery figures addiction, clinical depression, emotional deadness, and lethal entertainment. Plank gives unusual weight to very minor characters — the "figurants" — above all the old nurse on the dementia ward whose one line, "Help," is uttered only a handful of times: one can be encaged "not only in a hospital room, but within the structure of a narrative."
  • Two forms of help / contending with the cage (Chapter 3). First, Abiding (Wallace's capital): the disciplined inhabiting of a cage one cannot escape, epitomized by Gately's unnarcotized endurance of his gunshot pain — a present-moment concentration ("the present between pulses") read alongside Csikszentmihalyi's flow and the E.T.A. players' body-flow. Second, relational breaking-out: speaking and hearing in the AA/NA community, the Buberian and Levinasian "revelation of faces" (appearing unveiled and vulnerable before an other), and acts of touch — Mario grasping Barry Loach's "fuliginous hand" (IJ 971), the "rampant, indiscriminate hugging" (IJ 504) that erupts after an NA meeting.
  • Gately as "boneless Christ" (Chapter 4). Wallace's "unabashed vesting" of Gately as a Christ-figure works through the paradox of a Christ "at once in need of help and yet capable of providing it": Gately becomes a "confessional booth" in his hospital room (IJ 831), is tended by Joelle in the "Veronica" role of wiping the suffering face, and the device lets Wallace advance a theological claim — that the condition that encages human beings also offers the potential to "modify or even arrest its alienation."
  • The redemption of the reader (Chapter 5). The reader's experience approximates the novel's own breakthrough modes: hearing becomes curiosity and attention, touch becomes empathetic identification, and the "revelation of face" becomes the reader's reflexive recognition of self in the narrative mirror. As a "failed entertainment" the novel "redeems most in the way it pushes the reader beyond the cage of the page to the world in which breakthrough is possible and urgent."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Reading Infinite Jest is itself a redemptive act — not because of any stated moral or lesson but because the full, demanding experience of reading it pushes a lonely reader back toward connection and "the opposite of loneliness"

  • Crux: reading-as-rehab
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [inference] The book's governing wager: "can reading Infinite Jest make one better?" — whether the "long thing" can do "redemptive work" — pursued as an ethics of fiction (Booth, James, Nussbaum). [Introduction, printed pp. 2–3]
    • [inference] Getting better "is not a matter of the lesson drawn or any moral idea, but is a matter of the full experience of reading the thousand-page plus novel." [ch. 1, printed p. 11]
    • [secondary] Recovery-community testimony offered as warrant: Leslie Jamison's disciplined "fifty pages a day" reading in The Recovering, and the "Infinite Summer" blogger "infinitedetox," for whom the book "made [him] want to be a better person." [ch. 1, printed pp. 7–9; Jamison, Fitzpatrick]
    • [author] Grounded in Wallace's own purposes — fiction as "an anodyne against loneliness" as portraying "what it means to be a fucking human being" and as "redemptive"/"nourishing" (McCaffery), "spiritual, almost religious" reading that leaves you "just never the same" (Garner). [ch. 1, printed pp. 12–18]
  • Notes: Plank's own counter-pull, carried per the counterevidence clause: he foregrounds Nussbaum's cold water — "When one reads a novel one is alone...books are not sufficient for good human living" — and Fitzpatrick's caution that contending with a novel about addiction can be confused with recovery itself (a "whole different kettle of fish" IJ 204). The redemption is therefore only completed off the page. The reviewer Scott Annett flagged that Plank's related claim — that a reader "should assume Wallace has said precisely what he has intended to say" — rests on an uncertain "seems" (a weakness in the authorial-intention grounding). This is the specifically theological/ethical development of the reading-as-recovery mechanism.

THEORY: Infinite Jest is a "failed entertainment" by design — it must negate its own immersive pull, exerting a centrifugal force that ejects the reader back into the world, or it fails ethically

  • Crux: book-as-entertainment
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [author] Wallace's working subtitle, A Failed Entertainment (via D.T. Max): the novel is meant to be an immersive temptation like the senior Incandenza's film, yet one that "finally does not hold its readers fast unto death, but forces them off and beyond the page" [ch. 1, printed pp. 30–32]
    • [secondary] Frank Cioffi: to read the novel "is, in some way, to become the pathologically ambitious tennis player, the desperate show-off, the helpless addict"; its "compulsive readability" plus its Unheimlich thematics push the reader off the page. [ch. 1, printed pp. 30–31]
    • [secondary] Toon Staes: IJ's "many gaps and ambiguities" mean it "does not unequivocally promote such recentering" — it blocks the total immersion it tempts (Steeply's father, lethally absorbed in MASH*, as the cautionary figure). [ch. 1, printed pp. 29–30; IJ 640–646]
    • [text] Johnny Gentle as the anti-model — the crooner-president who asks the nation "simply to sit back and enjoy the show" (IJ 383), against which Hayes-Brady's "Wallace...asks us to do difficult work" is set. [ch. 1, printed p. 17]
  • Notes: Overlaps entertainment-lethality / entertainment-purpose (the cartridge as the negative image) and reading-as-rehab (the redemptive mechanism the failure serves). Plank's paradox: the novel succeeds only by failing as an entertainment, i.e. "failing to fail."

THEORY: Infinite Jest is a work of the "new sincerity" / post-postmodernism — it moves past the postmodern irony Wallace glossed as "learning to love the cage," toward a Ricœurian hermeneutics of belief

  • Crux: sincerity-definition
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] Boswell: Wallace as "a nervous member of some still-unnamed (and perhaps unnameable) third wave of modernism" who treats both modernism and postmodernism as "done." [ch. 1, printed pp. 20–21]
    • [secondary] Adam Kelly's "new sincerity," clarified via Ricœur's hermeneutics of suspicion vs. belief / "second naïveté" [ch. 1, printed pp. 21–23]
    • [author] Wallace's "anti-rebels" passage (from "E Unibus Pluram") — writers "who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles" — read against Jamison's need for "single-entendre truth." [ch. 1, printed pp. 21–22]
  • Notes: Plank glosses irony as Wallace's "learning to love the cage," tying the New Sincerity directly to the book's cage master-metaphor. Endorses rather than advances — Plank adopts the Boswell/Kelly placement as settled. Routing: the New Sincerity strand lives at sincerity-definition per the standing registry ruling declining a separate new-sincerity anchor (block drafted as new-sincerity, re-keyed at audit).

THEORY: The novel's minor characters ("figurants") are not disposable furniture but a deliberate humane design — the old dementia-ward nurse whose one word is "Help" is the figure through whom Wallace most clearly sounds the novel's central concern

  • Crux: figurant-design
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] The nurse recurs, dispersed, across the novel: introduced as setting ("One ancient retired Air Force nurse does nothing but scream ‘Help!’...from a second-story window" IJ 196, with the residents' teasing "HELP WANTED" sign hung beneath it); heard from the E.T.A. hill ("a repetitive scream for help come up from someplace downhill" IJ 452); heard on Mario's night walk (IJ 590–591); and at the shooting ("‘Eeeeeeeyelp!’" IJ 608–609; "Helphelphelphelphelp" IJ 615). [ch. 2, printed pp. 42–53]
    • [text] The wraith's own figurant credo to Gately: background extras are "human furniture, figurants" and Himself "made sure...you could bloody well hear every single performer’s voice" — "real life’s real egalitarian babble of figurantless crowds," every member "the central and articulate protagonist of his own entertainment" (IJ 834–836). Plank reads the novel as itself a "figurantless crowd" [ch. 2, printed pp. 44–45]
    • [secondary] Woloch's The One vs. the Many (distributed attention, character-space/-system, the minor character as "engulfed" or "explosive"); Rorty on Nabokov's Kasbeam barber (incuriosity as cruelty); Bell & Dowling's roster (12 major, 350+ minor characters); Henry James "they too should have a ‘case.’"; Zadie Smith — "Wallace’s fiction cares what happens to the stupid, the coarse, and the blind." [ch. 2, printed pp. 44–53]
  • Notes: Plank grants the counter-pull he builds on — an author "cannot really avoid fragmentation and is inevitably unfair to both minor and major characters" (Woloch's Hamlet-is-never-fair-to-Claudius); redistributing attention to the nurse is therefore "a reader’s prerogative and perhaps also his or her ethical duty" never a guarantee the text delivers. This substantial scholarly exhibit family materially strengthens the (previously register-only) figurant slug; the nurse's cry is read as a reflexive "HELP WANTED...for the one and the many." The Annett review's figurant reading is confirmed and here vastly out-detailed.

THEORY: "Encagement" is Infinite Jest's master-predicament — Hal's "I am in here," anhedonia/depression, Poor Tony's Withdrawal, and Joelle's/Kate's suicidality are all one condition: the recursive, lonely self locked in its own skull

  • Crux: hal-condition
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] Hal's opening interview: "I am in here" (IJ 3), "I’m in here" (IJ 13) — audible only to himself, met with "this boy is damaged" (IJ 14); later self-doubt, "Inside Hal there’s pretty much nothing at all" (IJ 694), and "Are you in there?"/"be a fucking human being for once" to Mario (IJ 784). [ch. 2, printed pp. 54–65]
    • [text] The anhedonia/depression passage (IJ 692–698): anhedonia as "emotional novocaine" "everything becomes an outline of the thing"; Kate Gompert's clinical depression as "the Great White Shark of pain" a "hell for one" "It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames" (IJ 696); "the great transcendent horror is loneliness" / "peer-hunger" / fear of "being really human" (IJ 694–695). Avril's speech on those "afraid of obliteration, emotional engulfment...born imprisoned" (IJ 765–767). [ch. 2, printed pp. 64–69]
    • [text] Poor Tony's Withdrawal in the dumpster and Armenian Foundation Library stall (IJ 299–306) — refuge that becomes the cage; time personified as a wingless fowl until "Poor Tony had become an hourglass" Kate on suicide-watch, bangs "like a cell’s glossy bars" (IJ 68), "get me out of this" (IJ 78). Joelle's overdose attempt, cocaine "the blind god of all doorless cages" (IJ 231), "What looks like the cage’s exit is actually the bars of the cage...The entrance says EXIT. There isn’t an exit" (IJ 222). [ch. 2, printed pp. 59–70]
  • Notes: Plank's diagnostic frame, not an ingestion adjudication: he does NOT engage the DMZ question or the Year-of-Glad mechanics of Hal's collapse; he reads the opening as chronologically last (the novel "a gigantic flashback"). Lineage he leans on: Weber's and Weil's "iron cage"/squirrel-cage, Sartre's No Exit, Buber's It/Thou and Levinas's totality/infinity, Hayes-Brady ("a consciousness trapped in a body"), Kafka/Flannery O'Connor ("a deeper kind of realism") for the grotesque bodies (Orin, Mario, Pat Montesian, Gately "Easter Island statue" the legless A.F.R.), Tom LeClair. Overlaps cage-self-built and communication-solipsism.

THEORY: The Entertainment is lethal because it is the purest cage — an infinitely regressive, infantilizing pleasure that collapses the viewer's world to a single focus; but it is only the sharpest case of a universal appetite ("everyone worships")

  • Crux: entertainment-lethality
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [text] The medical attaché's paralysis before the cartridge (IJ 34–87); the film's victims "now all in wards. Docile and continent but blank...on some deep reptile-brain level pithed" (IJ 548); the seventeen-person Berkeley "death chain" (IJ 548). The word "entertainment" etymologized (inter+tenere, "held in"). [ch. 2, printed pp. 71–74]
    • [text] What little is known of the film's content: the Leavenworth prisoner's report of "a veiled woman going through a large building’s revolving doors" (IJ 549); Joelle's crib/"I’m sorry" scene and Notkin's "Death-Mother" gloss (IJ 938–939, 789). Plank flags the power may lie "in the medium and experience of spectation as much as in the particular narrative or image." [ch. 2, printed p. 74]
    • [text] The Marathe–Steeply desert dialogue: "you are what you love" (IJ 107); worship what you choose or become "a fanatic of desire...a citizen of nothing" (IJ 108); the U.S.A. that "would die...for the so-called perfect Entertainment...fed this death of pleasure with spoons" (IJ 318); "you cannot kill what is already dead" (IJ 319); the "real cage" is freedom-from without freedom-for (IJ 320, 781). [ch. 2, printed pp. 74–76]
    • [secondary] Bell & Dowling: "a culture that lives for self-gratification alone does not need external enemies...spiritual suicide" the Samizdat as "the coup de grace." [ch. 2, printed p. 74]
  • Notes: Plank ties this to this-is-water-connection — Marathe's "everybody worships" is the seed of This is Water, and the Bob Death fish fable at IJ 445 is named as the antecedent (n. 62). He notes the filmography lists five Incandenza films titled Cage (IJ 985–993, n. 72). He does NOT adjudicate entertainment-contents (what the film actually shows) beyond cite-as-written; he treats the cartridge as sui generis but keeps open that its lethality is medium-borne. Endorses the lethal-cage reading; the fresh contribution is folding it into the single encagement frame.

THEORY: The novel offers two ways of contending with the cage — Abiding (present-moment endurance, kin to Csikszentmihalyi flow) and relational breakthrough (speaking/hearing in AA, the revelation of faces, and touch); Gately is the exemplar of both

  • Crux: salvation-spectrum
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] Abiding as Gately's unnarcotized endurance (IJ 885): "Living in the Present between pulses" building "a wall around each second" "What’s real is the tube and Noxzema and pain...just like the Old Cold Bird" (IJ 859–860); "Abiding and not-Entertaining" (IJ 890–892); "everything unendurable was in the head" (IJ 861). Joelle's Evel-Knievel counting-days analogy (IJ 858–859). [ch. 3, printed pp. 85–89]
    • [text] A "not-thinking" flow read through Csikszentmihalyi: Orin Sr.'s garage tennis lesson, "learn to do nothing, with your whole head and body" (IJ 158), "See it as body" (IJ 159); the Stan Smith cartridge, "Don’t Think Just See Don’t Know Just Flow" (IJ 110); Mario's Feral Prodigy film (IJ 172–173); Schtitt's "life’s endless war against the self you cannot live without" (IJ 84). Wallace named a minor E.T.A. character Csikszentmihalyi and owned an annotated copy of Flow (per Andrew Bennett). [ch. 3, printed pp. 90–93]
    • [text] Breakthrough by speaking/hearing in Boston AA: "Good to Hear You" (IJ 442–444), Coming In / Giving It Away, "the truth unslanted, unfortified. And maximally unironic. An ironist in a Boston AA meeting is a witch in church" (IJ 369); Identify-don't-Compare; the stripper's and the stillborn's mothers' testimonies (IJ 370–379); Mario finding Ennet House "very real" (IJ 591–592). Read via Buber's I-Thou "breakthrough." [ch. 3, printed pp. 95–102]
  • Notes: Counterevidence Plank himself presses (per the clause): Abiding and flow are NOT a panacea — flow's "nothing else seems to matter" (Csikszentmihalyi) "frames out" the nurse's cry, so even Gately's noble Abiding "cannot escape the cost of being so" "excruciatingly alive"; the flow-players are also "entranced" "hypnotized" "on auto-pilot" "blankly rigid...schizophrenics and Zen adepts" (John Wayne's "automatic beauty" IJ 260, 262), i.e. flow "risks becoming like the entertainment it would otherwise avoid" and both flow-messages reach the players through film. Abiding "may not apply so readily to Kate Gompert’s form of clinical depression" Overlaps gately-salvation/reading-as-rehab; the fresh move is the Abide vs. breakthrough taxonomy and its Buber/Levinas/ Csikszentmihalyi scaffolding.

THEORY: Joelle van Dyne's veil dramatizes the novel's "revelation of the face" theme (Levinas) — the source of her disfigurement is left deliberately enigmatic, with three non-reconciled explanations, so the veil is about the risk of unmasking, not a settled fact

  • Crux: joelle-veil
  • Stance: entertains
  • Evidence:
    • [text] Three unreconciled accounts of the deformity: (1) lethal beauty — the "P.G.O.A.T." whose "transhuman beauty" is "hideously attractive" (IJ 290), "I am so beautiful I am deformed" (IJ 538); (2) the Thanksgiving acid burn from her mother's thrown Pyrex flask (IJ 793–795) — related ONLY by the possibly-unreliable Molly Notkin, who "was not there, may never have seen" Joelle’s face; (3) cocaine ravages, surfacing in the dental dream (IJ 724). Plank leaves "the issue of her deformity...enigmatic throughout the novel." [ch. 3, printed pp. 107–108]
    • [secondary] Levinas's Totality and Infinity — "the face is present in its refusal to be contained"; the veil set against the novel's masking motif (JOI "Le Masque" IJ 737; videophony masks, IJ 148; U.H.I.D.) and ETA's "seeing instead of being seen" (IJ 660). [ch. 3, printed pp. 103–104]
    • [text] Joelle moving toward unveiling: at the CA meeting she considers "possibly showing somebody the face" (IJ 710); "to hide openly" (IJ 535); the veiled thing as "the encaged rapacious thing inside" (IJ 229); Gately's dreams of unveiling (Churchill face IJ 847; the "next life’s mother"/angel IJ 850–851; "Wait"), paralleled to Ortho Stice's face-lift-at-the-window (IJ 871). The film shows her unveiled but "scopophilic" Mulvey's male gaze (IJ 230). [ch. 3, printed pp. 109–111]
  • Notes: Plank does NOT adjudicate which explanation is true — the archive's live joelle-veil question (genuinely acid-disfigured vs. delusionally beautiful) is left open by design; he foregrounds the acid account's sole source as unreliable Notkin, consonant with the archive's caution on that evidence. His interest is the veil-as-encagement/face-as-infinity reading, not the disfigurement fact.

THEORY: Mario Incandenza's touch is the novel's clearest act of grace — his "blind," un-self-conscious handshake of Barry Loach's "fuliginous hand" redeems Loach from untouchability

  • Crux: mario-grace
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] The Barry Loach episode (IJ 966–971): Loach, made deliberately "untouchable," begs passersby only "to touch him"; they substitute "abstract loose change for genuine fleshly contact"; Mario, "largely clueless about anti-stem defensive strategies" "extended his clawlike hand and touched and heartily shaken Loach’s own fuliginous hand" (IJ 971), redeeming him from a "loneliness unto despair"; the episode ends with all sauna-door locks removed (IJ 971). [ch. 3, printed pp. 116–118]
    • [text] Touch as breakthrough vs. transgression: the NA "Rampant, indiscriminate hugging" (IJ 504–506), Roy Tony forcing Erdedy's hug ("We done motherfucking surrendered our wills in here"); against incest (IJ 684, 371) and "crewing" (IJ 128–131). Orin Sr.'s "touched whatever he touched as if it were part of him" / "A tennis ball is the ultimate body" (IJ 158, 160). [ch. 3, printed pp. 112–116]
    • [secondary] Levinas on the caress — "the caress consists in seizing upon nothing" a "blind" contact that does not totalize; Thich Nhat Hanh on hugging so "the person in your arms becomes real" [ch. 3, printed pp. 113–115]
  • Notes: Plank grants the counter-pull: touch "may express violence and destructiveness" (the incest scenes, Roy Tony's aggression), and hugging is "no panacea" (Hal on K. Bain's Inner Infant, IJ 805). The Loach episode "turns on the reader who cannot take up Mario’s innocent vantage" — grace is shown, not a method given. Feeds the Mario-pole of the salvation-spectrum package; the Loach scene is the fresh exhibit.

THEORY: Don Gately is deliberately shaped as a "boneless Christ" — a figure at once in need of help and able to give it; his wounding, his silent role as hospital confessor, and his being tended by Joelle-as-Veronica enact a sacrifice-to-redemption pattern

  • Crux: gately-salvation
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] The "boneless Christ" image seeded in grandfather Orin Sr.'s monologue: "the drunk and the maimed both are dragged forward out of the arena like a boneless Christ, one man under each arm, feet dragging, eyes on the aether" (IJ 169). Gately shot defending the Ennet House residents from Lenz's Canadians (IJ 601–619), "Get me inside" (617), "dragged/carried...inside" (819) — maimed, boneless, removed from the "spect-op" arena; his saving-someone fantasy (611); Joelle's "for Christ’s sake somebody call Pat" read as "for Don Gately's sake" (610). [ch. 4, printed pp. 126–132]
    • [text] Gately as confessor: intubated and mute, an "empty confessional booth. Don G. as huge empty confessional booth" (IJ 831), receiving Tiny Ewell ("tiny ewe"/Good Shepherd, per Severs), the "se offendendo" Hamlet pun (IJ 814), "I’m scared" (815) and Gately's reach to touch (816); the wraith's confession. His "enforced silence" read via Rowan Williams / Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor / McCullers's Singer. [ch. 4, printed pp. 134–139]
    • [text] Joelle as St. Veronica wiping the Christ's face (IJ 817, 854), "And Lo" (619); the dental dream (IJ 723–724) where Gately is a haloed "holy dentist" whose word is "these can be saved" and in whose forehead-mirror Joelle finally sees her own face — "The savior from solipsism is the one in whose face you see your own" (Nathan Little). [ch. 4, printed pp. 140–142]
    • [secondary] Herculean parallels (Burn, Severs): Gately's "massive square head" (IJ 277) ↔ Perseus/Hercules square (IJ 507); twelve AA steps ↔ twelve labors; Shattuck showers ↔ Augean stables (IJ 434–436); "Sir Osis of Thuliver" (IJ 449). Robert Detweiler on the Christ-figure device. [ch. 4, printed pp. 131, 148]
  • Notes: Counterevidence Plank carries: Gately's "most overt act of heroism is the most disappointing" — taking the bullet for Lenz is "to no effect" (Lenz lives to stalk Chinese women), "noble, but not redemptive"; measured against "full transformation of the world," the boneless Christ "fails," and the Christ-figure device can produce "failed embodiments" (Rowan Williams). Redemption is therefore only provisional. Plank is explicit this is typological/connotative, "Gately is not Christ in disguise, but fully Don Gately" — the "Big Indestructible Moron." Feeds the Gately-pole of salvation-spectrum; substantially the fullest Gately-as-Christ reading the archive holds.

THEORY: Infinite Jest advances a genuine (if unsystematic) theology — its redemption is grace-inflected, not the "godless" Nietzschean nihilism Dreyfus & Kelly read; God "acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings," and what saves is dialectical (choice plus an "abundant given")

  • Crux: theology-sin-salvation
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] The Ennet House theological list: "there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels"; "God...speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a God"; "God might regard the issue of whether you believe there’s a God or not as fairly low on his/her/its list" (IJ 205). "religion of the physical" (IJ 169). [ch. 4, printed pp. 129–130]
    • [text] Grace over will: the Betty Crocker cake analogy — "if he just followed the motherfucking directions...a cake would result" (IJ 467), "All that mattered was what he did" (466); destiny "leans" "out of an alley with some sort of Psst" then "an individual person’s basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events" (IJ 291). Gately "engineers virtually nothing" [ch. 4, printed pp. 146–148]
    • [secondary] The set-piece rebuttal: Hubert Dreyfus & Sean Dorrance Kelly (All Things Shining) cast Wallace as a Nietzschean who makes the sacred "something we impose upon experience; there is nothing given about it at all" — Plank rejects this, arguing IJ's characters are divine agents/vehicles, not autonomous wills, and that "even godless redemption gets one out of the arena" Detweiler, Buber, Heschel, Christian Wiman in support. [ch. 4, printed pp. 145–149]
  • Notes: Plank concedes the weaker case that Wallace's characters may be "divine surrogates who act in the absence of God" (Gately's Christ inhabits the room the departed character "Lord" has left, IJ 817) — but argues the novel makes the God-question "moot" from the sufferer's vantage. This is a live scholar-vs-scholar dispute recorded per the counterevidence clause. Also touches wallace-theology-arc (Plank reads The Pale King's Abiding as the fuller development). The theological reading is NOT a genuinely new lane for the archive (existing slugs carry it via Braithwaite/den Dulk); Plank is its fullest book-length development.

THEORY: The wraith's confession reframes James Incandenza's filmmaking — the Entertainment was a last-ditch act of paternal love, an attempt to reach his "muted son" Hal and to say "I AM SO VERY VERY SORRY and have it heard"

  • Crux: wraith-agenda
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [text] The wraith to Gately: the film was to "concoct something the gifted boy couldn’t simply master" "reverse thrust on a young self’s fall into the womb of solipsism, anhedonia, death in life...A way to say I AM SO VERY VERY SORRY and have it heard" (IJ 838–839 as Plank renders it — the print puts a comma in 'SO VERY, VERY SORRY'). [ch. 4, printed pp. 137–138]
    • [text] The figurant credo tied to the same paternal concern — JOI's films (like the novel) leave "finally no minor characters," giving voice to the muted, echoing Death of a Salesman's "attention must be paid." [ch. 4, printed p. 138]
  • Notes: Plank treats the wraith as a real presence — "another troubled spirit in line to tell his story to the confessor" — without adjudicating wraith-reality; his interest is the confession's content. Gately hears it as "gross self-pity" and Plank grants that "Whether this leads the reader to see James Incandenza in nobler light is debatable" (counterevidence carried). Overlaps entertainment-purpose and figurant-design.

THEORY: The novel forces its reader into the position of the "drunk and maimed" — as a mirror it denies any exempting "idolatry of uniqueness" compelling identification even with Randy Lenz, so that reading becomes the reader's own redemptive breakthrough

  • Crux: reader-realization
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] Reading as the three breakthrough modes: hearing = curiosity/ attention ("So yo then man what’s your story?" IJ 17; the nurse's "Help," Rorty's curiosity-as-"paradigm for morality"; Skull's cummings-tattoo abuse reading, IJ 208; Otto Brandt's "Otto Brandt here!" as his own "I am in here," IJ 875); touch = empathy (the Man o' War Grille bag-lady, "totally illed or totally awed," IJ 683); facing = reflexivity (the narrative as mirror). [ch. 5, printed pp. 161–169]
    • [text] The "idolatry of uniqueness" (IJ 604) / Denial "is not a river in Egypt" (IJ 272): the reader must "Come In" and read by "identification and not comparison" forced to "see themselves in the face of Randy Lenz" — via Bruce Green watching "rapt...transfixed" (IJ 584), whose spectatorship mirrors the reader's own. [ch. 5, printed pp. 168–171]
    • [text] Map ≠ territory (Eschaton, IJ 322–336; "It’s snowing on the goddamn map, not the territory" IJ 333; "eliminate one’s map" = suicide, map = face, per Hayes-Brady/Korzybski/Borges): "the final cage is the reader’s, the margin-bound page itself" so the novel's "centrifugal force" must eject the reader off the page. [ch. 5, printed pp. 158–160, 172]
  • Notes: Plank reads the non-ending (Gately's Fackelmann fever-vision, the beach "tide was way out" IJ 981) as a deliberate "tangential" closure (Torgovnick) that "shoves its readers toward the world beyond the page" — he does NOT engage the ending's plot-mechanics (no Hal–Gately missing-year, no head-digging, no DMZ); the non-closure is read thematically. Records the closure debate per the counterevidence clause: Kakutani ("that word machine is simply turned off") vs. Hayes-Brady (closure-resistance as purpose); Pietsch's suppression of the A Failed Entertainment subtitle called "wise." Closes with an invented "Postscript" — Plank imagines Wallace's This Is Water "I wish you way more than luck" appended to the novel: "You boneless Christs, I wish you this, way more than luck." Overlaps book-as-entertainment and reading-as-rehab; the mirror/identification-with-Lenz reading is the fresh contribution.

Themes

Addiction and recovery (the AA/Ennet House ethos, Gately's Abiding, the "Come In"/"Giving It Away" grammar of the rooms); entertainment and the self (the lethal cartridge, spectation, the "failed entertainment"); communication and solipsism (the "skull-sized kingdom," "I am in here," the wall between minds); depression and anhedonia (Kate Gompert's "It," Hal's emotional deadness); disability and the damaged body (Mario, Poor Tony, Pat Montesian, the legless A.F.R., the body as first cage); the veil and the face (Joelle, unveiling, Levinas); fathers and sons (the Incandenza monologues, the wraith); theology and redemption (the boneless Christ, grace, the "religion of the physical"); irony and sincerity (the "new sincerity," "the truth unslanted"); and the ethics of reading (attention, empathy, the reader's own redemption).

Cross-references

Notable passages

Verbatim from Plank (curly typography and the extraction's fi/fl ligatures preserved).

Infinite Jest is not about addiction as much as the culture which preys upon it.

Instead, the novel intends to worry the reader to life.

The drunk and the maimed which are finally everyone in Infinite Jest: these are the “boneless Christs.”

Because map is not territory, the final cage is the reader’s, the margin-bound page itself.

If the novel denies, it also supplies; if it takes away entertainment, it provides the hope for encounter with a fuller, living reality embedded in the very human condition that has tempted the flight to entertainment, addiction, and the full parade of human obsessions.

You boneless Christs, I wish you this, way more than luck.

Advances