On Finishing Infinite Jest

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TL;DR

Swartz's companion post to his famous ending theory, published the same day (16 Sept 2009) and linking to it in its headnote. Not analysis but a short memoir of forgetting: a nine-month, three-city, illness-interrupted first read during which whole chapters vanished from his memory ("whole chapters I'd not only forgotten but showed no signs of ever having read"). Slight on its own, but it reframes the ending post: the "only truly convincing explanation" of IJ's end was written by a reader whose dominant experience of the book was memory loss — which is also one of the novel's own subjects (Hal's year, Gately's Demerol gaps).

Key claims

Swartz can't remember starting, buying, or who recommended the book; he reconstructs his own reading history forensically (price sticker, an unreadable note stamped with a German hotel's address found at p. 750) — a miniature of IJ's own evidence-from-fragments method.
He stalled mid-book assuming it was "a bunch of isolated stories... and had only a handful of good parts," and only resumed (from where he left off) for Infinite Summer 2009; the turn came ~p. 500: "As the Aventura kicked shit into the Antitoi's door I realized I'd been missing the point."
Flipping back to check a detail, he found "whole swathes" he had no memory of ever reading; rereading "didn't jog a single memory."
Verdict: "The whole book is laced through with mocking cracks at this disconnected style, like a preemptive apology. And the ending really doesn't help matters. But in the middle it is truly grand, some of the best fiction ever. I just hope that I'll remember it."
The post is dated September 16, 2009 — the same date as the ending post (ijend), which its NOTE header points to for "those who have actually read" the book. The reading that produced the canonical ending theory was finished days earlier at most.
Context found while archiving: Swartz's weblog contains only these two IJ posts. His "2011 Review of Books" (aaronsw.com/weblog/books2011) adds two capsule DFW reviews — praising Lipsky's Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (while calling Lipsky's interpolations infuriating) and reading The Pale King as capturing "the entirety of this political moment the same way Infinite Jest captured the cultural one."

Themes

Memory and forgetting as a reading condition (cf. Hal's missing year, Gately's gaps); entertainment/attention (a self-confessed "very rarely read novels" infovore retrained by the book); the Infinite Summer community as the thing that got him through.

Cross-references

The ending theory itself: swartz-ij-ending; the rebuttal: general online discussion.
Kevin Guilfoile links to the ending post in the Summer's End Roundtable Part II ("this thorough attempt to explain it") — the theory entered the IJ mainstream through Infinite Summer within a week of publication; see infinite-summer-guest-essays.
The memory/forgetting angle parallels John Green's confession (Infinite Summer guest essay) that he read IJ three times in 1996 and "had absolutely no idea what the book was about."

Notable passages

"Around page 750, I found a note I couldn't read in a hand I didn't recognize with a symbol I couldn't understand. But it was stamped with the address of our German hotel."

"I was shocked to find whole swathes of things I didn't even recognize, whole chapters I'd not only forgotten but showed no signs of ever having read."

"But in the middle it is truly grand, some of the best fiction ever. I just hope that I'll remember it."