Minor structure & design cruxes (compact)

In plain terms: the cluster of smaller structure-and-design questions, headlined by the reading that Infinite Jest is the deliberate execution of the program in Wallace's essay "E Unibus Pluram" -- with Marathe's mountainside argument as that essay's conclusion in costume.

Where the text lands: the E-Unibus-Pluram-execution reading is the best-supported one (its author-force lexical bridges and the built temple-and-choosing scenes carry it, capped because the execution-intent half stays author-side). The other minor design questions in this cluster range from best-supported to contradicted.

Also gathered here are smaller readings the archive tracks without full treatment: that the Eschaton set-piece is pure comedy with no point (contradicted by the scene itself, which argues its own map-versus-territory theme on the page, pp. 333/337); that a hidden Boston geographic cipher exists (rejected by both readers who tested it); and thinner leads about a windows/perception motif, the book's length making you feel time pass, and the encyclopedic-novel ambition. Most of these have been seen once or are open leads rather than contested theories. Drawn from the archive's minor structure-and-design record.

The cluster keeps growing at its edges. It also houses the book's influence questions (Pynchon, Gaddis, DeLillo, Lynch -- and, newly earned on Wallace's own account of his homage-and-patricide exit from Barth's brand of metafiction, Barth himself); the reading of the Marathe/Steeply mountainside sections as a deliberate authorial device the reader is positioned to judge, with Wallace on record refusing Marathe's argument as a fascist's; the reading that Pemulis's wrong math deliberately marks the character (the math is demonstrably wrong -- the intent argument is the readers'); and the observation that the core vocabulary of the 2005 "This Is Water" speech is on tape in Wallace's mouth in March 1996, twelve years before the Kenyon address.