American Hamlet: Shakespearean Epistemology in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

TL;DR

A Cleveland State MA thesis (2014) that makes an unusually sustained case for reading Infinite Jest as a deliberate rewriting of Hamlet — not a loose allusion but a working constraint. Walsh’s governing claim is that Wallace built the novel the way Georges Perec built his ("Oulipo") fictions: Hamlet is the finite frame, the "prescribed limit," inside which an infinitely complex modern story is improvised. The thesis reads Hamlet as the book’s very center — against Boswell’s influential claim that the novel has no center — and answers Toon Theuwis’s skeptical verdict that the Hamlet parallels are meaningless. Its most original contribution is Chapter IV, which decodes the Latin/technical "ghostwords" the wraith of James Incandenza pours into Don Gately’s head (IJ 832) as a cipher for Wallace’s adaptation method — with the musical term acciaccatura naming the technique itself: Hamlet is the melody, every other allusion a grace note struck "one half step below." Around this Walsh maps Hal and Gately as twin Hamlet stand-ins (Gately doubled onto Hercules), Joelle van Dyne as Ophelia, and the Avril/Charles-Tavis coupling as the play’s levirate marriage; and he reframes the whole book, via Alcoholics Anonymous and a Lacan/Kearney reading of Hamlet as a "tragedy of narrative memory," as a sincere moral answer to postmodern irony — Wallace’s own "longest fourth step ever written." A high-conviction, pro-Hamlet thesis whose ghostwords cipher and Oulipo-constraint framing are its most original moves; its close-readings lean heavily and openly on Stephen Burn’s Reader’s Guide.

Key claims

• Hamlet is a working constraint, not a decoration. Modeling the book on Perec’s "story-making machine" (the Oulipo method), "Wallace used Hamlet as the constraint within which he created an infinitely complex and modern story." In the abstract’s terms, "Hamlet operates as a primary textual constraint" and the novel is "a closed system in which geometry and literature converge". The difficulty of the text is proof of the constraint at work, not evidence of a "meaningless" maze.
• Hamlet is the novel’s center — against the reigning no-center reading. Where Boswell holds that the book’s "primary symbol is in fact an absent center", Walsh answers that "we may read Hamlet as the book’s center, particularly the skull symbol," and that reading the play as the center explains why so many loose ends stay open (the play being "notorious for begging more questions than it answers").
• Hal and Gately are both Hamlet. "Don Gately and Hal Incandenza are both stand-ins for Hamlet," foils and mirrors of one another — Hal the melancholic prince, Gately the tragic hero who suffers for others, doubled onto Hercules (via Burn’s Perseus/"massive square head" parallel and Hamlet’s own "no more like my father / Than I to Hercules").
• Joelle van Dyne is Ophelia, displacing Boswell’s candidate Kate Gompert: Madame Psychosis’s free-associative broadcasts echo Ophelia’s mad monologues, and her freebasing vision of Bernini’s "Ecstasy of St. Teresa" (IJ 235) supplies the "form and feature of blown youth / Blasted with ecstasy" the play leaves offstage.
• The Avril/Charles-Tavis coupling is the play’s levirate marriage, an inversion of Claudius-and-Gertrude (Tavis, Avril’s half-brother, becomes headmaster after Himself’s death), with the vocabulary seeded directly into the wraith’s ghostword "CIRCUMAMBIENTFOUNDDRAMALEVIRATEMARRIAGE."
• The wraith’s "ghostwords" are a decoder ring for the adaptation. The list crashing through Gately’s head at IJ 832 — ACCIACCATURA, LAERTES, POOR YORICK, the levirate compound, and a run of optical terms — encodes how Hamlet was reworked. Acciaccatura (a grace note "one half step below" the principal note) names the method: "the Hamlet narrative is the “principal note,” the melody/harmony, and everything else is acciaccatura". Walsh reads the ghostwords as reflecting "the work of the real author, David Foster Wallace", not just Incandenza’s.
• Grave-digging is the book’s structural and spiritual hinge. The title comes from Hamlet’s graveyard scene; Poor Yorick Entertainment is named for Yorick’s skull; Enfield was a real town (a hamlet) whose dead were exhumed and reburied to flood the Quabbin reservoir; and the plot’s one possible Hal/Gately meeting is a shared grave-digging dream (IJ 934). In AA, Walsh notes, addiction is itself described as "digging one’s own grave."
• IJ is a sincere moral text, Wallace’s own AA "fourth step." Reading the book as Wallace’s "personal inventory" ("it’s probably the longest fourth step ever written"), Walsh argues it is "a moral text, plain and simple" — not preaching to the reader but searching the author’s own conscience, the sincere answer to the exhausted irony that had made Hamlet "theoretical waste."
• Wallace answers Hamlet’s despair with AA’s narrative psychology. Via Lacan and Richard Kearney’s reading of Hamlet as "a play about a crisis of narrative memory" — a story where "no one actually tells their story" — Walsh casts AA’s practice of sharing one’s story (and "relating rather than comparing") as the cure the play lacks: the way out of the postmodern fugue of self-consciousness and solipsism.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Hamlet is the organizing intertext of Infinite Jest — a deliberate rewriting in which the play works as Wallace’s finite creative constraint, present from title to closing ambulance

• Crux: hamlet-frame
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [author] DFW’s Feb 1996 WBUR radio interview, on the Hamlet in the title: "there are about 170 different dimensions for me", "There’s a fair amount of Hamlet stuff", and "…to the extent that we’re a generation I think we’re a bit of a Hamletish one" (via Walsh’s transcription, timestamps 28:45-29:00).
  • [author] McCaffery interview (1993): "I load it with standard Hamlet-esque constructions of double binds" (Walsh, Interviews 43).
  • [text] The opening/closing keying: the play’s first line is "Who’s there?" and the novel’s is "I am"; the time is "out of joint"; Hamlet’s dying "Oh I could tell you" answers Hal’s "So yo then man what’s your story?" at the novel’s chronological end (scene 003, IJ 17).
  • [text] Character mapping: Hal and Gately as twin Hamlet stand-ins (Gately doubled onto Hercules); Joelle van Dyne as Ophelia (the Bernini "Ecstasy" vision, IJ 235, scene 062); Avril and Charles Tavis as the play’s levirate marriage (Claudius/Gertrude inverted).
  • [secondary] Extends Toon Theuwis’s dissertation — the only prior study to take "a definitive stance on the Hamlet problem" — and Stephen Burn’s Reader’s Guide, from which Walsh takes the Perseus/Heracles constellation parallel (IJ 507, scene 101; Gately’s "massive square head," IJ 277) and the May-Day/Golden-Bough dating.
  • [inference] The Fortinbras war over a worthless "little patch of land" ("That hath in it no profit but the name") mapped onto the U.S.-Canada dispute over the Great Concavity/Convexity.
• Notes: This is the whole thesis — the second sustained academic survey of the Hamlet intertext after Theuwis’s dissertation. Counter-currents the source itself carries: (1) Walsh writes against Theuwis, who judged that "the affinity of Wallace’s Infinite Jest / with Shakespeare’s Hamlet is problematic, to say the least", that "Hamlet has been made unrecognizable," and that the connections in IJ are "more or less in a meaningless way" — Walsh grants the surface unrecognizability but reads it as the constraint working, not failing. (2) He writes against Boswell’s absent-center reading (see the closed-system block). (3) His own strongest author evidence is itself modest: DFW frames Hamlet as one strand in "a whole tapestry of other stuff in your head", which soft-pedals the organizing-key claim even as Walsh presses it. The WBUR quotes are Walsh’s transcription of a radio broadcast (audio/ASR-class underlying source): recorded here as leads, not as archive-verified verbatim.

THEORY: The wraith’s "ghostwords" (IJ 832) are a cipher for Wallace’s Hamlet-adaptation method — with the musical term acciaccatura naming the technique by which Hamlet is the melody and every other allusion a grace note

• Crux: ghostwords-cipher, hamlet-frame (also bears on wraith-reality / wraith-agenda: the ghostwords are the wraith’s transmission to Gately)
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [text] The ghostword list crashing through Gately’s head — ACCIACCATURA, LAERTES, POOR YORICK, the levirate compound, plus optical terms (NEUTRAL DENSITY POINT, MENISCUS, CHRONAXY, PROPRIOCEPTION) — at IJ 832 (scene 162).
  • [secondary] Acciaccatura, "a discordant note sounded with a principal note or chord and immediately released": Walsh reads the Hamlet allusions as struck "one half step below," so "the Hamlet narrative is the “principal note,” the melody/harmony, and everything else is acciaccatura". The optical terms (meniscus = a convex/concave lens) name the doubling by which one Hamlet is split and magnified across Hal and Gately.
  • [inference] LAERTES, POOR YORICK, and the levirate-marriage compound are the three "most obvious" direct Hamlet keys; the ghostwords therefore reflect "the work of the real author, David Foster Wallace", not merely Incandenza’s filmography (extending Jonathan Goodwin’s Explicator note, the only prior critic to treat the list).
• Notes: Walsh’s genuinely new contribution to the Hamlet strand — no prior archive sighting reads the ghostwords as a Hamlet decoder. Because the ghostwords are delivered by the wraith to Gately, the reading tacitly assumes the wraith’s reality and communicative agency, though Walsh takes no position on the ontology question and treats the transmission as an authorial device. No counter-argument is offered in-source; Walsh concedes the reading "may be somewhat hard to grasp" and rests it on analogical, not textual-cite, grounds.

THEORY: Infinite Jest is a closed, self-similar system whose apparent chaos is subsurface order — Hamlet is the finite constraint that lets an "infinite" text fragment into beauty

• Crux: annular-structure
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [text] Schtitt’s tennis as "the place where things [break] down, [and] fragment […] into beauty" (IJ 81, scene 026) — Walsh’s model for the whole book: infinite possibility within finite space.
  • [text] The benzene ring (Hal on the Dean’s "Kekulean knot" of necktie, IJ 5) read as the novel’s first annular figure — the ouroboros, self-devouring and cyclical — tying the Hamlet-constraint to the book’s recursive ("annulation") design.
  • [secondary] Against Boswell: where Boswell holds "[IJ’s] primary symbol is in fact an absent center", Walsh reads Hamlet (and the skull) as the center; "a fractal structure in IJ" that the reader assembles, "much more than a simple lesson in Derridean deconstruction."
  • [author] Wallace’s own descriptions of the book as a "very careful mess" "dropped off the 20th story of a building" (Conversations 57, 70), deployed to argue the disorder is designed.
• Notes: The Oulipo/constraint framing is the distinctive content — Hamlet as a Perec-style generative limit rather than a thematic mirror, welded to the book’s closed-system/fractal/recursive design. The in-source counter is Boswell’s absent-center reading, which Walsh quotes and disputes rather than suppresses.

THEORY: IJ is a sincere moral work — Wallace’s own AA "fourth step" — that answers Hamlet’s postmodern-ironized despair with the narrative psychology of Alcoholics Anonymous

• Crux: new-sincerity (also aa-narrative-form)
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [text] The Joelle/"Mad Stork" passage (IJ 742) read as the novel taking "clear-cut sides": beneath the "campy abstract mordant cartridge" surface is "an unironic, almost moral thesis." Walsh: "IJ is a moral text, plain and simple."
  • [inference] The book as Wallace’s AA fourth step ("a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves"): "we may read IJ as Wallace’s personal inventory," and "it’s probably the longest fourth step ever written" — a self-examination, not a sermon at the reader.
  • [secondary] Via Lacan and Richard Kearney ("Spectres of Hamlet"), Hamlet is "a play about a crisis of narrative memory" where "no one actually tells their story"; AA’s practice of sharing one’s story and "relating rather than comparing" is the cure the play withholds — "a release from the cage of the self."
  • [author] Wallace’s anti-rebel manifesto (the anti-rebels "who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching," Conversations 60) and the Salon "not to lie" passage, marshalled as Wallace’s sincere program.
• Notes: Aligns with the novel’s new-sincerity / recovery-form readings but arrives at them through Hamlet: the sincerity cure is specifically the answer to the play’s "tragedy of narrative memory." Walsh’s own hedge is on record — the final chapter ("ENDNOTE") concedes he has "only scratched the surface" and that skeptics may call the thesis "an endless chain of improvable and unsubstantiated claims."

THEORY: Grave-digging is the novel’s structural keystone and its homage to Hamlet — from the graveyard title to Enfield’s drowned dead to the shared exhumation dream

• Crux: hamlet-frame
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [text] In Walsh’s reading "grave digging serves a reflexive role as an homage to Hamlet" (as well as the authorial function): the title from the play’s graveyard scene (5.1); Poor Yorick Entertainment named for Yorick’s skull; Gately’s hospital dream of "digging some dead guy’s head up" (IJ 934, scene 175) and Hal’s "dig up my father’s head" (IJ 16-17, scene 003) as the plot’s one possible Hal/Gately convergence.
  • [secondary] Via Burn: Enfield was a real town flooded in 1939 to create the Quabbin reservoir, its dead "excavated and reburied" — "darkly appropriate for a novel that is partly about the returning dead".
  • [inference] The AA folk-figure of addiction as "digging one’s own grave" (and the crocodiles’ "if you want to hit your bottom then stop digging") ties the graveyard motif to the recovery narrative.
• Notes: Overlaps the main Hamlet block, but Walsh’s Chapter III ("Set and Setting") is the fullest single treatment of the grave-digging motif keyed explicitly to Hamlet. No in-source counter. Block re-keyed graveyard-intertext → hamlet-frame: the executed 2026-07-12 registry fold routed the grave-digging dossier to the hamlet-frame record; graveyard-intertext is the Leone-film slug — drafter routing corrected.

THEORY: The search for the Entertainment’s master copy is a Hamlet-style plot device kept deliberately off-stage

• Crux: macguffin-design
• Stance: endorses
• Evidence:
  • [text] The "Extorted treasure in the womb of earth" (Hamlet 1.1) mapped to "digging up J.O. Incandenza’s head to locate the master copy of the samizdat"; the scene "presumably takes place ’off-stage,’" so its plot implications for the film and the A.F.R. stay ambiguous by design.
• Notes: A brief but clean macguffin-design datum: the master-copy hunt as the never-resolved plot thrust, read as Hamlet-patterned deferral. Recorded as support, not a full argument.

THEORY: The Brothers Karamazov and Bakhtinian dialogism sit alongside Hamlet as recognized frames (name-checked, not argued)

• Crux: karamazov-frame (with a figurant-design aside)
• Stance: mentions
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] Walsh’s literature review name-checks Timothy Jacobs’s "The Brothers Incandenza" (Karamazov mapping) and Catherine Nichols’s "Dialogizing Postmodern Carnival" (Bakhtin) as existing scholarship, without advancing either; he cites Theuwis on Hal’s "solipsism and eventual muteness" (the figurant/muteness reading) only as an allusion he catalogs.
• Notes: Recorded so both frames are noted, though Walsh subordinates them to Hamlet — his claim is that Wallace’s whole theoretical framework "is all traceable to Hamlet." No new evidence for either.

Themes

Structure and intertext (Hamlet as constraint and center; the Oulipo/Perec method; the closed system that fragments into beauty; the fractal/annular design); family and inheritance (father-son inheritance across Hamlet, Hal, and Gately; the Avril/Tavis levirate marriage; the returning dead); addiction and recovery (AA as narrative psychology; the "fourth step" moral inventory; addiction as grave-digging; relating not comparing); irony versus sincerity (Hamlet as ironized "theoretical waste" restored to sincerity; the moral text beneath the campy surface; the anti-rebel program); the wraith and the ghost (the ghostwords cipher; "Hamlet is the ghost in this machine"; the spiritual versus the religious); death and mourning (the graveyard scene; Ophelia’s offstage death expanded through Joelle; Hamlet as a tragedy of memory and mourning).

Cross-references

• hf-theuwis-quest-encyclopedic-postmodern — the closest sibling and Walsh’s chief interlocutor: the only prior study to take a definitive stance on the Hamlet question. Walsh borrows Theuwis’s catalog of allusions (title, grave-digging, the Polonius genre-list parody, Fortinbras’s futile war ↔ the Concavity) while flatly rejecting Theuwis’s verdict that the parallels are "meaningless" and Hamlet "unrecognizable."
• burn-ij-readers-guide — Walsh’s most-used secondary source; the Perseus/Heracles constellation reading, the Enfield/Quabbin reburial history, the May-Day/Golden-Bough dating, and the "religious book" possibility all come from Burn, whom Walsh then re-routes through Hamlet.
• boswell-understanding-dfw — the foil: Walsh argues directly against Boswell’s "absent center" (reading Hamlet/the skull as the center) and against Boswell’s Kate-Gompert-as-Ophelia (proposing Joelle).
• jacobs-eschatological-imagination and nichols-dialogizing-postmodern-carnival — name-checked in the literature review as the Karamazov and Bakhtin frames respectively, both subordinated to Hamlet.
• gc-ep040-greg-carlisle-elegant-complexity — Walsh draws on Carlisle’s introduction to Consider David Foster Wallace for the claim that Wallace’s characters "read more like characters in a play than a traditional novel."
• structure-and-hamlet and family-hamlet — the novel’s Hamlet material synthesized as a theme; Walsh’s high-conviction reading sits beside the more cautious accounts there of the feigning-madness debate and the Avril/Tavis levirate plot-fact.

Notable passages

Verbatim from Walsh’s thesis; IJ phrases inside them are Walsh’s own citations (Back Bay 2006 edition) and may differ slightly from the novel’s own wording.

• "Hamlet is the star that Infinite Jest steers by, both as a creative inspiration and a cultural and spiritual aesthetic." (Introduction)
• "Modeling his text after Georges Perec’s" "story-making machine," "known as the Oulipo method," "Wallace used Hamlet as the constraint within which he created an infinitely complex and modern story." (Introduction)
• "We may read Hamlet, then, as the source code for IJ". (Literature Review)
• "Hamlet is the loose guideline for Wallace’s narratological improvisation; the result: Infinite Jest." (Literature Review)
• "Don Gately and Hal Incandenza are both stand-ins for Hamlet, albeit through different interpretations; but they are also foils and mirrors of one another." (Literature Review)
• "IJ is a moral text, plain and simple." / "we may read IJ as Wallace’s personal inventory" / "it’s probably the longest fourth step ever written." (Introduction)
• "Acciaccatura is a musical term and perhaps the most significant expression of the structural technique used to adapt" Hamlet. (Ghostwords)
• "the Hamlet narrative is the “principal note,” the melody/harmony, and everything else is acciaccatura, a piece of ornamental improvisation." (Ghostwords)
• "Hamlet is the ghost in this machine." (Introduction)
• "Hamlet is the primordial dust of Western literature, the clay from which our storytelling and culture has been shaped". (Endnote)