Infinite Jest character diagram (poster)

source

TL;DR

Sam Potts (book designer) made the definitive IJ character map: "A diagram of nearly all the characters in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, with connections and relations shown thereamong." Sold as a 36"x24" two-color poster until Feb 2011, then released as a free PDF. The site is dead; the page text and the full PDF (1 page, 34"x22" tiled layout) are preserved locally.

Key claims

Coverage is near-total: hundreds of named characters with relationship lines — family, ETA, Ennet House, AFR/government, film/entertainment webs — on one sheet.
Potts built it with input from IJ experts (the wallacewiki main page notes he "tapped the knowledge of a number of IJ experts" researching it).
The PDF contains the same information as the printed poster, re-laid-out at 34"x22" so it tiles onto four 11"x17" sheets without names falling on seams.
Practical use for this project: the fastest way to check who-knows-whom across the three main webs (Incandenza family / ETA, Ennet House / Boston AA, and the Marathe-Steeply / AFR / O.N.A.N. plot), which the novel deliberately keeps apart until late.
Promoted by both The Howling Fantods ("Sam Potts' amazing diagram") and the wallacewiki main page ("Every fan of IJ simply must have this!").

Themes

Character architecture; the novel's three-strand structure and its slow convergence; family and institutional networks.

Cross-references

Page-text archive: `[local source]
Cataloged on howling-fantods-ij alongside the smaller alternatives (Jake Bittle's plot-symmetry diagram, the jonny.snsy.de flowchart, Matt Bucher's character profiles).
Featured on wallacewiki-ij's main page.
Read the PDF with `[local source] (chronology) for a who/when matrix of the novel.

Notable passages

"A diagram of nearly all the characters in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, with connections and relations shown thereamong." — poster subtitle