ellauri063.html on line 426: The novel is widely noted for its unconventional narrative structure and its experimental use of endnotes (there are 388 endnotes, some with footnotes of their own). It has been categorized as an encyclopedic novel.
ellauri063.html on line 432: Infinite Jest is a postmodern encyclopedic novel, famous for its length and detail and for its digressions that involve endnotes (some of which themselves have footnotes). It has also been called metamodernist and hysterical realist. Wallace's "encyclopedic display of knowledge" incorporates media theory, linguistics, film studies, sport, addiction, science, and issues of national identity. The book is often humorous yet explores melancholy deeply.
ellauri077.html on line 46: This article examines David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest alongside its eponymous film, arguing that they share a common purpose, but that the former succeeds where the latter fails. Coupled with a biographical and phenomenological analysis, the aim of this examination is to better understand Infinite Jest’s place in the cultural and literary movement away from post-modernism. Through the novel, Wallace seeks a cure for the postmodern malaise that is irony, which creates a distancing effect between author and reader. I argue that he collapses this distance by creating a conversation-like novel that uses sentimentality and endnotes to converse with a generation bombarded with easily consumable irony from television, advertisements, and even art. The results of this conversation are the curtailing of passive consumption of entertainment and the beginning of a new sincerity in literature, which allows for grand narratives without the unending cynicism of postmodernism.
ellauri077.html on line 627: This process does not lead to a passive, solely pleasurable experience such as taking a drug or watching television. Instead, what awaits that reader is a book that forces her “‘to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort’” (McCaffery 119). Perhaps the most difficult aspect of Infinite Jest (and the one for which it is fated to be infamously known) is the use of endnotes, which will be our entry into thinking of Infinite Jest as a conversation-text.
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