Diagnosing David Foster Wallace

TL;DR

A University of Rhode Island senior honors thesis reading Infinite Jest strictly for its form — structure, prose, and metafictional technique — against the backdrop of Wallace's own essays ("E Unibus Pluram," "Fictional Futures") and the McCaffery interview. Redinger argues that Wallace deliberately reclaims the metafictional devices he elsewhere condemns (nonlinearity, footnotes, difficult prose) as a "vaccination" against the passive consumption TV trains, but that his simultaneous need to keep readers amused reopens a door to the very "empty, mocking irony" the book means to critique — so Infinite Jest remains, by her account, "susceptible to being read ironically." A rare form-first reading that ends in a self-defeat thesis rather than a defense.

Key claims

• Form over theme, on purpose. Twelve years on, Redinger says, "twelve years later and we still cannot tell this book’s ass from its elbow"; rather than mine the much-mined thematic content, she gives her attention "solely to its style, structure, and formal qualities."
• Nonlinearity and footnotes as disruption. The first chapter "is chronologically the last chapter of the story"; the continuity breaks imply the book "should be read cyclically in a kind of shoutout to the concept of infinity", or at least heavily back-checked. Footnotes (she counts 96 pages, footnote 110 the 17-page Hal/Orin call, footnote 349 the one-word "sic") exist in part "for the sole purpose of breaking the reader’s engagement".
• The apparent contradiction. These are exactly the metafictional/"little gray people" devices Wallace disparaged — writers "who take the machines others have built and just turn the crank" and whose real point "is ‘Like me because I’m clever’". Redinger's resolution: in Wallace's hands the devices "serve a purpose beyond themselves," keeping readers alert rather than flattering the author.
• The EUP substrate. She reconstructs Wallace's "E Unibus Pluram" argument at length: "the nexus where television and fiction converse and consort is self-conscious irony"; TV lures viewers because "it engages without demanding"; "Irony, poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are distinctive" of a culture in which irony and ridicule "are agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture". Image-fiction fails because "TV has co-opted" its ironic weapons; Wallace's answer is difficult "serious" art that makes the reader work.
• Prose as microcosm. The difficult prose (vocabulary "several standards of deviation above the norm", medical/pharmaceutical jargon, coined acronyms — ONANTA, AFR) is not incidental: "Infinite Jest’s prose functions as a microcosm of its larger structure", making the reader do the same cross-referencing work sentence-by-sentence that the whole demands. She flags pages 487-489 as "the longest sentence in the entire book" yet "some of the easiest to read."
• The self-defeat thesis. Wallace's prose must both distance and amuse; but "Wallace’s double effort to distance the reader and to amuse the reader creates an unwanted side effect" — held at a distance, readers "find it acerbic," and the humor reads as mockery, so "Wallace’s prose often comes across as falsely ironic", reopening "a place in his text where empty, mocking irony can gain a foothold". She reads Mario's birth (scene 071: "He had to be more or less scraped out, Mario, like the meat of an oyster") and his description ("an odd dead gray-green that in its corticate texture and together with his atrophic in-curled arms") and Kevin Bain's crying scene ("Hal has never actually seen projectile-weeping before", scene 160) as places where a serious subject is rendered in an ambiguously mocking tone.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Infinite Jest's difficult form (nonlinearity, footnotes, dense prose) is a deliberate inoculation against the passive, TV-trained mode of consumption Wallace diagnosed in "E Unibus Pluram"

• Crux: reading-as-rehab
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [author] "E Unibus Pluram," as Redinger quotes it: irony and ridicule "are agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture"; her gloss, "Irony as a method has gone bankrupt." [pp. 8-11]
  • [author] McCaffery interview: Wallace's form-conscious writing "is trying … to do the opposite" of TV's rewarded passive spectation — "It’s supposed to be uneasy." [p. 13]
  • [inference] Redinger's reading: the footnotes and non-chronology are "a sort of vaccination against passive modes of consumption", making the reader "sweat." [pp. 14-15]
• Notes: Maps also to book-as-entertainment/anti-entertainment and eup-connection. Redinger stresses (cite-as-written) that the strategy is only partly successful — see the irony block.

THEORY: The novel is built to be read cyclically — its first chapter is chronologically its last, a formal gesture toward infinity that forces re-reading

• Crux: annular-structure
• Stance: endorses
• Evidence:
  • [text] The opening (chronologically final) Year-of-Glad interview, after which "a lot of significant, critical information is revealed to readers who have no sense of its importance until they finish the book". [p. 6]
  • [inference] The continuity disruptions "imply that Infinite Jest should be read cyclically" in "a kind of shoutout to the concept of infinity". [p. 6]
• Notes: Structural, not plot-crux; Redinger treats the loop as a reading protocol, not (as some do) a key to the missing year.

THEORY: Infinite Jest fails to escape the ironic loop it critiques — its prose, forced to both distance and amuse, reads as "falsely ironic," so the book remains susceptible to being taken as one big ironic gag

• Crux: irony-vs-recovery
• Stance: complicates
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] Iannis Goerlandt's argument that the novel is "structurally susceptible to being read ironically" — the reader can "look on it with suspicion" as "one big joke played on us all". [p. 22, quoting Goerlandt]
  • [text] Tonal-ambiguity exhibits: Mario's birth (scene 071, p. 313); Mario's "reptilian/dinosaurian" description (scene 071, p. 314); Kevin Bain's projectile-weeping (scene 160, p. 807), each serious-yet-comic. [pp. 20-24]
  • [author] Wallace's stated aim, against which she measures the failure: art should "ask the reader to really feel something" / reach "the art's heart's purpose." [pp. 13, 24, quoting McCaffery]
• Notes: Counterevidence in-source (required by the lens): Redinger reports she "personally did suspect that the book was untrustworthy, laughing at me behind my back", then concludes "This can’t truly be the case" given Wallace's stated sincerity — "the true irony of Infinite Jest is that he’s trying as hard as he can to do the opposite of creating irony". She grants Goerlandt's description while relocating the fault from content to prose; hence complicates, not endorses.

Themes

Metafiction and its exhaustion; irony and sincerity (the EUP diagnosis); form as resistance to televisual passivity; the difficulty and tonal ambiguity of the prose; reader engagement vs. detachment.

Cross-references

• The EUP/image-fiction material overlaps heavily with hummel-image-fiction-thesis-dfw, which reconstructs the same "E Unibus Pluram" argument for the Girl-with-Curious-Hair stories; Redinger applies it to Infinite Jest itself.
• The falsely-ironic-prose reading is a dissent from the sincerity-recovery readings the archive leans on — a rare skeptical voice on whether the book's sincerity project succeeds.
• In the novel: Mario's birth and description (scene 071), Kevin Bain's Inner-Infant crying scene (scene 160).

Notable passages

• "instead of focusing on the thematic content of Infinite Jest … I’ve decided to give my attention solely to its style, structure, and formal qualities."
• On the prose: "Infinite Jest’s prose functions as a microcosm of its larger structure."
• The verdict: "Wallace’s prose often comes across as falsely ironic."
• Quoting IJ (Mario): "He had to be more or less scraped out, Mario, like the meat of an oyster from a womb".