This was phenomenal, why do you all shit on it again?

can you post anything of his that is beyond neo christian morality?
don't get me wrong i like his wordplay but beyond entertainment he has no value not that i see anything wrong with that except when you want to be more than that

I dont know. It was one of my favorites things I read this year

>... Wallace privately conceded to Jonathan Franzen that "the story can't fully be made sense of".[29]
Why would I read this shit?

Awful calligraphy

It's not pretentious, it's a satirical work bro.

>A novel will be of a high and noble order, the more it represents of inner, and the less it represents of outer, life; and the ratio between the two will supply a means of judging any novel, of whatever kind, from Tristram Shandy down to the crudest and most sensational tale of knight or robber. Tristram Shandy has, indeed, as good as no action at all; and there is not much in La Nouvelle Heloïse and Wilhelm Meister. Even Don Quixote has relatively little; and what there is, very unimportant, and introduced merely for the sake of fun. And these four are the best of all existing novels.
Schopenhauer

cope

honestly it's like eat pray love for naval gazing young white men.

Not really

yes really

that's a terrible comparison

>all this midwit butthurt
Just accept that you wasted your time on the literary equivalent of a fleshlight

are you triggered?

I like to look at ships leaving and coming into the harbour, what's the issue with that? Sometimes I squint my eyes and try to imagine the ships have sails and the landscape is something out of JMW Turner, with blurry skies and blurry seawater, and a mighty vessel sailing into the horizon.

No because i dont care about IJ, it's just a stupid comparison.

oh so you're a julia roberts fan? suck my fucking dick buddy.

>julia roberts
not that guy but you think julia roberts isn't hot what are you a fucking homosexual?

she looks like a tranny's corpse with rubber lips.

all white women age like milk tbqh I would never stick my dick in a wh*toid

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alcoholics are the normalfags of drug addicts also he was a bunson burner level nerd so his attempts to sound encyclopedic were embarrassing

>age like milk
>I would never stick my dick in a wh*toid
AHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAH i'm supposed to be against you but i like this post

Wallace actually didn’t love IJ. Personally I think it’s a clusterfuck of genius, written by a clearly intelligent guy with good writing ability, but who couldn’t quite sort through his ideas enough to make a firmly coherent work.

yea but he was a wanky milky retard

As are most genius my friend

you mean i, as a white person, have to cum in my mouth to be a genius?

This is actually really accurate user. I agree complete

Great thread

You’d have some strange habits if you were a genius, probably. Note that I’m being generous in calling him a genius tho

I mean, that's kinda the joke too...
this is the mistake that many critics make.
the book is a critique of itself, any attempt to mock it is anticipated by the book.
It succeeds as a meta-piece in many respects.
there is genius in there, it's just bloated.

Thanks for your contribution, you filthy ironist

This is mostly misunderstood.
the aspects that cannot be understood are reflective of certain paradoxes in our culture.
the gaps and incongruities draw attention to certain things.

Interrupting this thread to say that you all should at least appreciate the fact that there’s a work worth any sort of dissection in the past 40 years.

i don't cum in my mouth but i want to be a genius is that the min. requirement for a milkboy such as myself is what i'm asking

only a true midwit does not understand the significance of wardine be cry desu.
if you do not understand this you literally won't understand the novel as a whole, it's part of the whole meta-context that makes it work.

I will never not laugh at the greatly deserved ridicule of this hack fraud. DFW will be remembered by posterity as the most incompetent snake oil salesman western literature has ever produced.

The only sincere act of his life was when he kicked away the chair. His life was nothing but a series of ironies and lies predicated on the the joke that is new sincerity. The big punchline was the creaking of the rafter and the piss trickling down his leg to the floor.

his epiphany that the only viable thing for him to do was to kill himself was the best thing to happen to literature in 30 years since he began writing because behind all the self aware gimmicks and self help books and the drugs and the audience pussy there was no discernible talent.

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i dont even understand this.
the eat pray love analogy was much stronger.

Everything in IJ is basically normal culture today. The weed addiction, the prevalence of depression and script drugs, opioids, TV-obsessiveness a la Netflix, and the strange political ideologies vying for power; I don't know if DFW was a visionary or if things just haven't changed much in 20 years, but just as a glimpse at the American psyche the book is brilliant.

This. Based

Wait, can you elaborate?
I actually really like the book but I thought that for the most part it had been "figured out." Things were certainly left unsaid, but much more careful readings than mine managed to piece them all together into a pretty coherent narrative.
What gaps and incongruities do you think are intentionally left as criticism of paradoxes?

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specifically it relates to John Wayne and whether or not he betrayed the AFR or worked with them.
The answer we will never have is what he is doing standing watch wearing a mask as Gately digs up Himself's head.
John Wayne represents a certain american ideal and ultimately we do not know where he stands.

that graphic is disgusting btw. it looks more profound than it is.
There is also no definitive statement of John Wayne's fate, the murder thing is pure speculation. We do not know what his decision was.

also
>AFR fails to kidnap Hal at the Whataburger
this wasn't even part of the plan.
It was meant to happen at the invitational and was in reality prevented by the change of venues to the MIT student union

Do you think Hal really was only such an autist because of the mold? I never liked that idea very much
I do buy that it has something to do with the DMZ reacting to strongly with him and that JOI was making many of his films in an attempt to connect with Hal, but "Hal's entire character is just cause he ate mold as a kid" is a cop-out

the mold is just a metaphor.
It's a meta thing, so is the toothbrush. There is a theme there about uncleanliness and things that grow from lack of due care i.e addiction.
this too is meant to be mysterious and reflective of society/culture outside of the narrative

What about whether Joelle was actually deformed or not? That was one thing I enjoyed being in limbo about

she was in fact deformed, sorry.

I didn't realize there was even any ambiguity about that. I mean the scene where the mom throws whatever it was at her, i forget, that was pretty clear wasn't it?

It's been years since I read it but I could've sworn that whoever was responsible for telling that story had a penchant for lying, or it was later contradicted and left unclear, or something.
The idea being that she hated being the PGOAT so much and having such an effect on people that she considered her normal face a kind of disfigurement and might have worn the veil anyway.

Her being so beatiful that people become retarded around her seems mote fun. But theres a scene where gately kind of notices her facial shape through the veil which sounds like she might have her beauty still. Who knows though

it's the book equivalent of dark side of the moon, you know what I mean?

that is a /possibility/ but very unlikely. Given that Notkin is being interviewed by ONAN authorities in that scene it would be pretty odd for her to lie.
She claims she doesn't know for sure and seems to hold some resentment for Joelle and that is why there is ambiguity, but from a story standpoint it makes more sense for her to actually have been burned as it gives incentive for Orin to leave her, because otherwise he has none.
it was a burn retard. her face shape remains the same.

Acid can badly disfigure the shape of your face though as well as burning though.

ugh... not significantly.
show me one example.

why do you think the NASA glass was mentioned so many times?

Let's see you write a better book

it's copypasta

and this is why muricans hate the book so much

some dumb shit about 2001 a space odyssey.
Hal being the machine "I can't let you do that Dave[-id foster wallace]"
and Ortho being the monolith (his name means straight-black-space essentially). Pay attention to the reference to the transom's shadow in their tennis match where Ortho curves the ball with his mind.
It ties into the whole transcendence thing, similar to what happens in 2001. Ortho tapping into ghosts and doing semi-magical shit.
It's a shit-show of references and not worth thinking too much about

Wasn't there a scene where she had acid thrown in her face?

It's a garfield comic. What is there to get?

how is that a garfield comic?

I'm currently 420 pages into it. Reading fiction is hard for me since my autistic brain has a hard time visualizing it but so far I like what I'm reading. I dunno if I should be reading my collection of historical nonfiction but eh.

The whole rise of the TP thing was fucking great. It was exactly like Netflix, outside of the physical cartridges

2001 being a key year to the plot as well as it most likely the year of the whopper.

What went on in the year of the whopper again? I remember the last year was glad, and most of the book was depent adult undergarment, but if whopper was 2001 that'd be significantly earlier

it was the first year of subsidized time.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Broom of the System, but I cannot get into Infinite Jest and I hate the footnote gimmmick.

you didnt read it

why do you say that?

you didnt read it

>footnotes

desu i found this whole thing cringe-worthy.
this girl decided she was going to eat infinite jest one page at a time when literally that is part of the book's idea.
Hurr infinite JEST- digest! so clever! gee i wonder if daily consumption was part of Dave's idea too? It's not like he doesnt' describe in the opening scene the smell of digestion as well (one of his few references to smell).

this is gonna fly over a lot of people's heads but subsidized time also representing a digestion process:
>Year of the Whopper
(a large sandwhich)
>Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad
(oblique reference to a stack)
>Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar
(bird)
>Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken
(bigger bird)
>Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster
(clean up)
>Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade for Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems for Home, Office or Mobile [sic]
(you-shit-you, long process)
>Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland (
dairy digests slow
>Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (Y.D.A.U.)
aged shits
>Year of Glad
its finally over

i did actually.
i dont believe you did however.

>1488

Hey nice

>I don't know if DFW was a visionary or if things just haven't changed much in 20 years
They have not changed much, prescriptions were probably bigger in the 90s, binge watching and the like was just really starting but many stations would do marathons of shows and massive VHS box sets were a dime a dozen. Opioids were just on the way out when IJ came out, the epidemic was just ending, see Trainspotting and Requiem for a Dream, hell, a huge amount of the big music acts were heroin addicts, heroin chic was the idealized version of a beautiful woman. Even though most did not realize it, heroin was huge and had a massive impact on the culture of the 90s.

DFW's one place of visionary insight was on were irony would take us, we are there.

You are really reaching hard there. He pretty much took the big advertisers from the time when he was writing it. They all had massive and successful ad campaigns that took their products from small time to household names. Anyone who was born in the late 70s or early 80s remembers these all very well.

Yushityu being the exception.

hey retard, it's called art. I'm not reaching, it's an analysis.
maybe you use things available to you to express ideas? literature is about making connections, especially in books like this. i assume you hardly understand it.

>all the big advertisers
there are PLENTY of others he could have used.
think of it like a poem.

To be fair, every time I've ever seen people shit on IJ, they never point out anything specific. It's always "it's overrated", or "it's a meme". Both are criticisms more of the dialogue around the book than the book itself.

no not really

But it isn't a comic, it's a book, and there's no cat named Garfield in it, so it can't be a Garfield comic

>you just didn't understand it bro
Holy shit, are you guys serious right now

yes, actually.
I mean you can dislike certain things about it, the dialog and some of the characterizations, maybe the insensitivity to marginalized groups.
But these things are done for a reason, you might not like how he did it, but you also almost certainly dont understand it.

You call it art, which is open for interpretation but then lash out when your interpretation is taken as anything but fact. I offered my view on your view and provided some background, an intelligent person would have looked at that information and my view and used it to further their own view instead of just lashing out.

Sure, but these ones were massive, you saw them every time you turned on the tv or opened a magazine and they were very successful add campaigns. Dove made its grainy milk chocolate into the idea of great chocolate and the definition of indulgence, they brain washed the masses. This holds true of all of those, they built their name solely on the basis of advertising. Which I think was why he chose them and the options for brands that pulled that off, was much smaller.

Hell, we went from one Burger King to half a dozen after that Whopper campaign, the Maytag Man was the cultural icon, jokes about the garbage bag wars were everywhere, the rise of farm aide and the plight of the farmers of the midwest was a defining moment for a huge part of the country, these were culturally significant and tie in with the ideas of the novel.

You're an idiot.
You're not disproving anything only pointing out an obvious correlation.
This is why I lashed out.
It's like pointing out where Picasso bought his paints and using that to critique the content of a piece.

if anything just look at yu-shit-yu and depend adult undergarment.
Other parallells exist in there and it builds itself. The whole book work like this. Remember the MASH scene?

Care to explain what you think its significance is then? If you want to be successful in making other people look dumb on the internet you have to prove that you aren't.

>dfw fags can't have civil discussion
This is the best thread today.

I dont have to do anything.
But i will make an effort out of pity.
Basically Wardine be cry ties into the central whiteness of the text, divides in society (i.e Ennet and ETA) and how language is a construct over which a universal theme is layed.
Wardine later works at Ennet House and fades into the background.
It's more complicated than that but hopefully you can work it out.

THESE PSEUDO "HUMAN CONDITION" INSIGHTS ARE PRECISELY WHY THIS BOOK IS ABSOLUTE RUBBISH.

WTF IS HE EVEN SAYING ...AND WTF IS A TINY CHILD?

i assume it is a child that is not large.

>dfw
dat face when?

bit verbose innit? coming from a self-proclaimed grammar Nazi.

Bloom was absolutely spot on with this meme author.

Bloom was just mad because of a single sentence that he didn't even have the context for. David was portraying him as tragic but well-intentioned figure. He didn't read the book.

Anyone read it chronologically? Was thinking to do it on my reread

I've done it.

Why do you sound so angry user? I'm down to talk about books I like but your tone comes off as aggressive.

I actually missed that about Wardine working at ennet house, but anyways thats an interesting analysis. There does seem to be a lot of vague stuff about race in IJ but I'm not really sure what a lot of signifies, especially with the wealth of white characters using the word nigger frivolously.

It's a very white book.
Elite whites, and lower-class whites mostly.
The nigger stuff is an accurate portrayal of the boston lower-class.

I get that, but Depends also had a massive marketing campaign and was a huge part of culture for a year, ads full of senior citizens living life to the fullest despite their incontinence were everywhere. All of these brands essentially subsidized a year, with the exception of the Tucks Medicated Pad which was part of a campaign for many sanitary products, the most culturally significant of that campaign being the doosh, and the amazing commercials with two woman having a heart to heart and one asking 'do you doosh?" Year of the doosh would not have worked well especially since doosh developed into a slang, you dooshbag, but the hemorrhoid shit was all part of the same campaign from a cultural stand point.

Not Wardine, Clenette, she works at ETA and is a tenant at Ennet house, she is the one that hauls the cartridges from ETA to Ennet House that Maranthe sees, she was the narrator of the Wardine section, and there is a fair suggestion that she is fairly young and immature during that narration.

Also wanted to add that, while interesting, I don't think the Wardine section is integral at all in understanding the plot/general themes/messages of the book. DFW writes in such a way where pretty much every other page he's preaching or exploring a new idea, which is awesome to read since he's undoubtedly a great writer but I think results in a lot of material in the book being not-so-important to the overall thing in itself. (As evidenced by the fact that DFW and Michael literally pruned the book down by like 800 pages prior to publishing.)

maybe it was clenette, not wardine my mistake.
Clenette (Clean-it) has to clean up for the people at Ennet who are getting clean. It's a comment on race relations.

wrong.
It was cut down by around 50 pages.
You can read the original manuscript outline online.
This was mis-represented because he wrote it out long-hand.

I don't think the Wardine section is integral at all in understanding the plot/general themes/messages of the book.
see
Another thing:
Elite whites go to ETA (Estimated time to arrival: where?)
Poor whites go to Ennet House (Inn-it, the place you live)

Really? I swear to god I read that Dave typed up one of the manuscripts in size 8 font or something to try and sneak more pages in.

thehowlingfantods.com/ij_first.htm

>Clenette (Clean-it) has to clean up for the people at Ennet who are getting clean. It's a comment on race relations.
No she doesn't, I think she is just mentioned once at Ennet house, I think during Lentz's tatoo obsession. She is a receptionist or something for Tavis? at ETA, what ever the job is, it suggests her language skills improved since the Wardine chapter. Wardine is the only section where we hear her voice, she is only mentioned a few times beyond that, once at Ennet, once outside of Tavis' office while Hal waits to see him, and once when Hal sees her walking down the hill with the bag of cassettes, and I think Roy Tony mentions her in his monologue.

She works for the head lady at Ennet House. I specifically recall her being commanded by her regarding what video tapes she is allowed to show to the residents.

>he is a receptionist or something for Tavis?
No.
> once outside of Tavis' office while Hal waits to see him,
this doesnt happen.

I am fairly certain that was not Wardine, that was Jeanette Folz if memory serves, who fills in for Gately.

i take it back it does happen, but she works at ETA as a 9-month temp as part of her continued residence at Ennet in a similar role as Gately.

and again, she deals with trash at ETA.
the point stands.

Yes it does, it is right before Hal sees her and the other girl going down the hill with the bag of cassettes. I do not believe she is there in the office at the time, Hal just mentions her in his narrative. Just finished my fourth read a few days ago, it is there.

she's collecting trash.
clean-it stands.
She is maintenance at Ennet, trash collector at ETA.

She is an office temp, not a janitor. Pretty sure Hal calls her a receptionist.

he doesnt. im looking at it now.
shes collecting trash into a grey canvas wastebasket.

Yup, you are right, just checked as well, had that part wrong. I do not buy 'clean-it' though, but that could just be wishful thinking that he would not use such a weak pun.

the book is full of weak puns.
Geoffrey Day? Gee, every day.
Randy Lenz? Please.

You can find such weak puns in everything, that is the thing with weak puns, it is like looking at the clock every day at 11:11, if you look you can find them everywhere.

Geoffrey Day is even weaker and bigger stretch.

youre a moron.

For explaining why I dislike weak puns?

Geoffrey Day is the guy over-intellectualizes his addiction.
The end solution of AA: take it one day at a time. Simple cliches.
Wardine?

you have ever right to dislike it but the book is fully of tacky shit like that.
Almost nothing is in there for no reason.
I always try to emphasize the importantce of the MASH discussion.

Yes, I know, I also explained why I dislike weak puns and admitted to wishful thinking.

Are you aware of the significance of the double (Dosteoevsky)?
Donald Gately and Doony Glynn?
Michael Pemulis and the MP?
Remember Pemulis' obssession with zippers aka flys? The MP's obsession with takiong apart the insect of the same name?

I will have to think on that one, I do not know how I missed MP and MP, Gately and Glynn I got. Think I will listen to The Double tonight at work and mull this over. Don't go ruining it for me now.

It's not that deep.
It's just there to cement that Gately and Hal are essentially the same person, different views of David at different times in his life.
It's also kind of a Ulysses reference in that respect (Bloom and Steven).

Can anyone explain the significance of Michael Pemulis's older brother being a fag, knowing Poor Tony, and getting butt raped by his dad with Michael Pemulis in the room?

yeah that unfortunately is just David's commentary on homosexuals being formed by traumatic childhood experiences relating to parents. It was a bit unnecessary and insensitive but i guess he didn't want to ignore the issue.
The association with Poor Tony is again just another reference to the marganialized people in society being lumped together out of desperation.

Fine, endnotes. And the first one was to tell the reader what methamphetamine was. Bravo, DFW. It truly enhanced my reading of the novel.

Only good post

I very strongly disliked the sections narrated by the illiterate black people - couldn't parse it at all

Did you actually make IJ lasagna after reading/making that post? I looked up that post in the archive expecting some shitstorm but it was like the last post in the thread.

Underrated.

There was only one of those
I do agree that it was egregiously bad though, I don't really know why somebody as obsessively grammatical as DFW would ignore the established rules of ebonics in such glaring ways
No American black person would ever say "Wardine be cry"

i thought wardine was supposed to be retarded honestly

i agree, it's really fun!

Some important jew said it was bad and not part of the canon.
After marathoning through the first ten pages myself I too didn't find any talent that was discernable.
Also the author always wore a bandana? big YIKES

No wonder the guy hung himself

this is what deterred me from reading more than the first three chapters

>Lord of the Rings hadn't come out yet

It’s cool to hate the book on here, this entire website bandwagons shit all the time and despises many things that are popular because they are popular, or because they feel smart for doing so, etc.

It’s a flawed but beautiful novel and very, very sad. Hal and Gately’s character arcs are incredible.

If Ortho taps into ghosts, he taps into James wraith right? so Hal plays against his dad at Whataburger?

It's garbage.
Fuck off /rdt/

It's pretty good.

Essentially, yes.
But it's more of a general idea. His father is everywhere all at once as his sense of time is radically different as a ghost. Ortho is just more willing and able to accept it.

Wait so is this why Hal almost loses to the darkness at practice?
I thought that was just Hal cracking mentally.

More specifically it is why he is able to curve the ball at the last minute out of Hal's reach.
He is actively /trying/ to do impossible things, mostly because of his own willingness (for example: roll a tomato up the side of a bowl).
His extra willingness is why he is selcted by the wraith and is exemplified by the fact he's complacent with and idolizes Gerard Schtitt's vaguely-fascist autocratic teaching methods.
He is described as looking vaguely like winston churchill as well and the phrase "“If you're going through hell, keep going" is repeated a number of times.
transcendence of the carnal self and needs ala addiction.

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