NOTE: I realize some Infsumerians didn’t like the (fully disclosed) spoilers in my last post. There’s a big one (a nuclear one) in this post, too, but I’m wrapping up the novel this week and it would be difficult for me to do that without making this point, so here’s my apology in advance. If you haven’t yet finished, I would think twice before venturing past the spoiler tag.
I’m sure it never even occurred to Harper Lee that she could end To Kill a Mockingbird right before the trial starts.
That’s because probably the most basic axiom of storytelling, so obvious it’s rarely said out loud, is that you have to tell the best part. And another obvious thing you should especially never do is Show Spoiler▼
So there are people who are rightly frustrated with the end of Infinite Jest. And what they don’t want to hear is that their frustration is the point, that the author has manipulated their emotions in the service of his literary agenda. So I won’t say that.
To be honest, my problem with a lot of so-called post-modern literature110 is that many of these books and stories and plays monkey with the conventions of storytelling just to point out the conventions of storytelling. Which sounds really good in an MFA workshop, but the people who actually buy and read books generally care about the scaffolding of a story as much as people who ride buses care about the assembly of diesel engines.
The good news is the scaffolding of the story is not Wallace’s point. Or if it is, it’s a small point among much, much larger ones.
Wallace probably would have enjoyed writing the scene where Hal and Gately finally meet. I kind of like to think he couldn’t resist doing it, secretly. But would it have been at all honest to write a massive book about the futility of the pursuit of happiness and then pay it off at the end in such a spectacularly satisfying fashion?
We are hardwired to believe in the existence of bliss, that the pursuit of it is even a fundamental human right, but that pursuit is, ironically, responsible for much of the crushing unhappiness we experience. Infinite Jest is loaded with examples of this. There is the Entertainment, of course, so pleasurable it turns the viewer into a vegetable. And every character at Ennet House is there because they chased bliss to the point of life-altering misery.
Lyle lays it all out pretty explicitly in his discussion111 with 11-year-old LaMont Chu, who still might be young enough to have never questioned his own personal right to happiness ever-after:
‘You burn to have your photograph in a magazine.’ ‘I’m afraid so.’ ‘Why again exactly, now?’ ‘I guess to be felt about as I feel about those players with their pictures in magazines.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Why? I guess to give my life some sort of kind of meaning, Lyle.’ ‘And how would this do this again?’ ‘Lyle, I don’t know. I do not know. It just does. Would. Why else would I burn like this, clip secret pictures, not take risks, not sleep or pee?’ ‘You feel these men with their photographs in magazines care deeply about having their photographs in magazines. Derive immense meaning.’ ‘I do. They must. I would. Else why would I burn like this to feel as they feel?’ ‘The meaning they feel, you mean. From the fame.’ ‘Lyle, don’t they ?’ Lyle sucks his cheeks. It’s not like he’s condescending or stringing you along. He’s thinking as hard as you. It’s like he’s you in the top of a clean pond. It’s part of the attention. One side of his cheeks almost caves in, thinking. ‘LaMont, perhaps they did at first. The first photograph, the first magazine, the gratified surge, the seeing themselves as others see them, the hagiography of image, perhaps. Perhaps the first time: enjoyment. After that, do you trust me, trust me: they do not feel what you burn for. After the first surge, they care only that their photographs seem awkward or unflattering, or untrue, or that their privacy, this thing you burn to escape, what they call their privacy is being violated. Something changes. After the first photograph has been in a magazine, the famous men do not enjoy their photographs in magazines so much as they fear that their photographs will cease to appear in magazines. They are trapped, just as you are.’ ‘Is this supposed to be good news? This is awful news.’ ‘LaMont, are you willing to listen to a Remark about what is true?’ ‘Okey-dokey.’ ‘The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.’ ‘Maybe I ought to be getting back.’ ‘LaMont, the world is very old. You have been snared by something untrue. You are deluded. But this is good news. You have been snared by the delusion that envy has a reciprocal. You assume that there is a flip-side to your painful envy of Michael Chang: namely Michael Chang’s enjoyable feeling of being-envied-by-LaMont-Chu. No such animal.’ ‘Animal?’ ‘You burn with hunger for food that does not exist.’ ‘This is good news?’ ‘It is the truth. To be envied, admired, is not a feeling. Nor is fame a feeling. There are feelings associated with fame, but few of them are any more enjoyable than the feelings associated with envy of fame.’ ‘The burning doesn’t go away?’ ‘What fire dies when you feed it? It is not fame itself they wish to deny you here. Trust them. There is much fear in fame. Terrible and heavy fear to be pulled and held, carried. Perhaps they want only to keep it off you until you weigh enough to pull it toward yourself.’ ‘Would I sound ungrateful if I said this doesn’t make me feel very much better at all?’ ‘La-Mont, the truth is that the world is incredibly, incredibly, unbelievably old. You suffer with the stunted desire caused by one of its oldest lies. Do not believe the photographs. Fame is not the exit from any cage.’ ‘So I’m stuck in the cage from either side. Fame or tortured envy of fame. There’s no way out.’ ‘You might consider how escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage. And I believe I see a drop on your temple, right…there….’ Etc.
By depriving us of the promised, surely awesome scene in which Gately and Hal and John N.R. Wayne dig up JOI’s skull presumably looking for the Entertainment (only to find, according to Gately’s premonition, that they were too late) but to never tell us exactly what happens to Hal between the end of this book and its opening chapter (or what happens to John Wayne, who would have won this year’s Whataburger112 if not for what we never find out) Wallace is making us painfully aware of the fact of the cage. Like that missing scene with Hal and Gately, perpetual happiness exists as an idea, but we can’t have it. And deluding ourselves that we can will only make us perpetually miserable.
Naturally a lot of us get to the end and, like LaMont, are scratching our heads and asking, Is this supposed to be good news?
I think it is, kinda. And I believe I see a drop on your temple right…there….
I think it is worth exploring the idea that Hal and Gately never actually meet. At the beginning, this is expressed by Hal as a flashback; but toward the end, it is seen by Gately as a JOI-wraith-inspired…what? flash-forward? If JOI can implant the episode into Gately’s mind (for instance, if he is trying to communicate a ‘remedy’ for the samizdat by trying to show its location to the living), he could have as well implanted it into Hal’s at some later point. To assume Hal and Gately do meet is to accept two layers of the supernatural–JOI’s communication with others after his death (though I wouldn’t be surprised if this somehow relies on the technology JOI has used for ‘Infinite Jest’, perhaps in conjunction with Lyle–who might well be doing the JOI-wraith thing all by himself), and also the wraith showing Gately the future (which somehow seems far less likely, in the scheme of things).
I know it’s exciting to be near the end, but it’s kind of alienating to many of us that breaking the spoiler line is becoming more prevalent. Even as a reader who’s slightly ahead of schedule, I have to avoid reading this post lest I read a major plot point.
(FWIW: I’m writing this comment from the POV of having finished the book.)
Aside from the simple human frustration of not having the dots connect (although, yes, this can be fun at times), I’m still on the fence about the ending.
(1) Part of me is like, “Way to go, Dave – totally get what you’re doing here. Rock.”
(2) Another part of me: “Um, ok, I see what you did here, as much as one can, but I have to say, uh, I’m not sure I buy that this doesn’t add up to what’s basically a 1000-page variation on the imitative fallacy.”
(3) And another: “Are you kidding? You spent years crafting an epic, loving book wherein the sincerity and humor and world depicted on every page makes us believe there is at least a chance of something good out there, even if one has to crawl through muck to get to it, and then you do this? That isn’t a thematic comment on happiness or whatever word one wants to use. That’s a pistolwhip. Come on. Liar.”
Anyway, every day I feel different. Now that it’s been two weeks, I’m much more in the first camp than I was, but in moments of weakness I’m definitely a #2 or #3.
Count me in the “disappointed” camp for the ending. I at least wanted to find out what caused Hal’s problems in the beginning (I’m assuming it’s that super-dope stuff that they found and they’re going to do in the next weekend or so, but would be nice to know for sure)
On the other hand, I auppose he’s saying “life doesn’t wrap up neatly” … but some kind of end to some kind of thread would have been nice for those of us that make it all the way through.
So I’m a #3 still, even though have been done with the book for weeks.
[...] is about the ending of the book. I was going to wait on it, but not that even Infinite Summer is talking about the end, well…You were [...]
Bummed, I’m sorry. This is my last post (other than as part of next week’s roundtable) so it was either discuss it now or discuss it never. This will all still be here when you’re done. Or you can skip it altogether.
Also, stop reading the comments. Including this one. Like right now.
Troybob, it’s certainly worth speculating about, and you can make a good argument for that. (At one point I was considering the possibility that both Gately at the end of the novel and Hal at the beginning were actually in Entertainment-induced vegetative states, but I threw that out for lack of evidence.)
For me personally, if you accept that the meeting never happened as described by Hal at the beginning of the book, it creates a problem for Hal’s reliability as a narrator, which I’m not quite willing to buy. But whether it actually happens or not, I think it’s clear that Wallace, by alluding to it twice, intended for us to anticipate it happening, and also for us to be disappointed when it didn’t.
(The picture of Hal and Gately digging up a grave is so outrageous, and so unlike anything in the rest of the book, that I now think it’s kind of funny that I fully expected that scene to materialize. It’s a bit of a practical joke, I think, as well, and a good one.)
“– which I refuse to believe he’s up to, given the previous 1100 pages.”
Sorry – my point is I don’t think he’s being cynical or condescending, especially given what we know about him, and the preceding 1100 pages, but it’s hard not to have a bit of that taste in one’s mouth.
I understand, though it would be cool if there could be a series of panelist essays either next week or the week after that you could use to look at everything in hindsight. Up until now, the essays have been a good support base for me to reflect on what I’ve been reading, and feel like someone’s going down the journey along with me. I guess I feel left in the dust, but that will change! Oh, how it will change.
This is a spoiler, so if you haven’t finished IJ, stop reading here. Fair warning.
In my opinion, Infinite Jest has no ending. With regard to the inconclusiveness of the final page, and the widely held view that the true “ending” of the novel is pg. 17, I believe that the novel remains in a constant state of repetition, reading like an infinity symbol. The last line of pg. 17, which is the furthest DFW takes us chronologically in the novel, is a question that is answered through pgs. 17-17(when arrived at again after reading the entire novel) at which point, the novel repeats eternally. This reading of IJ also corresponds with the view that Hal is the narrator, in which case, the pages following 17 are his response to the Doc’s question. Does anyone else share this view?
I agree that to the extent there is an end, it is page 17, but there really is no end. Annular fusion, to the max.
RE Hal as the narrator: I haven’t considered that. I’ve been comfortable with the changing narrator idea. That being said, it would not at all surprise me if, on reading through the pages after 17 AFTER having completed the book once, I find that I have a whole different take on the voices and action, i.e., it’s the same text but not the same book. I have not yet decided whether I have the will to do that experiment, though.
I am totally with you that it is a story in a loop. The end of the book is designed to make you go immediately to the beginning. As for Hal as narrator, I’m not convinced of that. The third-person narrator is (mostly) omniscient, so Hal would have to be making all this up, or his father’s ghost fed him all this info, or Hal is narrating from beyond the grave in his own wraith-like form, or maybe future Hal went back and interviewed everyone and wrote it all down as some Tom Wolfe-like piece of narrative non-fiction. I can’t see any evidence for that.
Related, and I haven’t quite figured out what it means, if anything, but the author of the footnotes is clearly different from the narrator(s) of the novel, as he/she often admits he doesn’t know what parts of the text mean.
And also, in the last 90 pages or so, the ETA sections are narrated in first person from Hal’s POV (which they hadn’t been in the past), except for the last one. I was puzzled about the switch and found it jarring, and I haven’t found a good reason for why DFW did that. The change in narration seems to correspond with Hal’s change in other people’s eyes but…
Spoilers ahead: do not read if you’re not at the end.
Kevin I really like your analysis, and I don’t think it’s inconsistent with the discussion of Wallace’s sincerity. He can be sincere, and even sometimes hopeful, but he’s not blowing sunshine up our collective asses–Joelle is not going to rip her veil down and walk hand in hand with Gately onto a porch into old age, Hal and Don and JW aren’t going to dig up JOI and get an antidote and save the world. Life is complicated, we’re not all happy all the time, and we better be grateful for what we do get, is what I think Wallace says.
After finishing IJ I wasn’t ready to let go of DFW’s writing so (on recommendation of many DFW fans) I read the “A Supposedly Fun Thing …” collection.[1]
In the essay on David Lynch he mentions what was wrong with the second season of Twin Peaks is that Lynch’s story telling style doesn’t work for solving mysteries, just for creating. This struck me as I wondered if the ending of IJ was DFW’s way of avoiding avoid that trap.
[1] I’d recommend reading the collection as couple of the essays seem like thumbnail sketches drawn in preparation for writing IJ, the two tennis ones and the Lynch one in particular.
Alison, I love that your brought up David Lynch.
I think Lynch has been avoiding that trap himself after Twin Peaks. After I finished IJ, I had the feeling I had experienced a similar narrative structure before… It reminded me of Lynch’s last film INLAND EMPIRE. The ending of IJ also reminded me of the end of Mulholland Drive — though with different consequences for the protagonist. Most of my friends’ reactions to those films was the same as their reaction to the ending of IJ.
I’ve always wondered if Lynch ever read that DFW essay or if he had read IJ. Or if Lynch and DFW just shared dreams.
When Twin Peaks ended, I read that Lynch more or less threw the last few episodes together: the network lost interest in the series (ratings were really low) and he was more or less forced to wrap it up. I don’t think the final few episodes are exactly what he would have done had he been given the artistic freedom to run with it for a while. I can’t remember DFW’s take on that–I read that essay when it came out.
The Lost Highway also has a very looped ending: the opening scene where Bill Pullman’s character get’s a call from himself (revealed later) is also the final scene, but it can’t be. A loop that is perfectly flawed. It does your head in trying to figure out how it fits, yet it can’t fit. And then there are the two different women who are the same woman and Getty’s character who is Pullman’s . . .
I always wondered what Lynch thought of Wallace too; anyone have any sources out there?
These posts are getting great. I think they really benefit from no spoiler line, to wax poetic with the whole thing in perspective.
Since the comments here are already spoilers…
Interesting, Kevin, that your initial thought was that Gately would actually meet Hal after the ending of the book. In this linear timeline. Not saying that yours is not a possible reading, but
cuz doesn’t Gately die?
I love the ending. It’s my favorite of the revisit-your-life’s-ID’ing-moments-before-the-End scenes. Here the creator, DFW, used an anaesthetic.
Kevin, since you’ve brought up lit-crit before: reader-response is an interesting thing. I assume this would have been the main topic of discussion next week. Since there’s a good sample size here, I wonder what everyone else here at Infinite Summer thought happened at the end. Poll?
Btw, I do think/hope that Gately and Hal meet and the former saves the latter. On a non-linear timeline. Points on a deformed Sierpinski gasket perhaps.
I figured Gately died at the end as well, in part because the last line was (for me) so reminiscent of the final line describing Lucien’s death (p 488-489).
Hmmm. Interesting.My reading was that it was touch-and-go for old Gately there but that he must have pulled it out in the end because he still had to meet Hal. I’m not sure when they could have met before that, but I like thinking on it.
I’m going to plead Occam here on the question of whether they meet. I believe they do because Hal says they did. And my reading of that sentence also leads me to believe that whatever happened is also the reason John Wayne lost/DNP in the Whataburger, which would put the event between the last page and the first, I think.
I would be open to/intrigued by evidence to the contrary, though.
Maybe my reading was wrong, but I read both grave-digging scenes (Gately’s and Hal’s) as surreal. Because if it’s the reason John N.R. Wayne didn’t make it to WhatABurger, I can’t imagine how Hal got back either. To play tennis. After something Continental-Emergency important.
It’s not impossible that after all the editing of IJ, that it might simply have some plot problems/inconsistencies. The Too Late importance of the grave-digging scenes (if they really happen) might be moot because haven’t we already been told that Orin’s the source of the copies of the Entertainment. Why would they go to dig up something that the AFR and Unspecified Services know is not there any longer? Which brings me to a related problem: in the next-to-last subchapter where Orin is in the glass tumbler cage, why would the AFR here demand to know Where Is The Master Buried? That implies they know it had been buried which if that was the case they wouldn’t need to ask that question, but it’s even more absurd because if they think Orin has the Master, why would they ask him where it’s buried?
Maybe sometimes it’s better not to re-read.
I like this explanation.
Very interesting! Now I need to reread the book.
Oh, man. Thanks for the link, Kevin, I needed that!
Since there’s a good sample size here, I wonder what everyone else here at Infinite Summer thought happened at the end. Poll?
If we do a poll, I request one option of “I don’t know and that’s okay.”
I was frustrated at first, but it’s been a few weeks, and now I’m okay with it. I find I’ve been mulling over so many of the concepts in the book that I’m not as worried about the plot.
Have any readers floated the notion that Hal doesn’t exist? That he’s maybe a figment of Mario’s imagination, or an extension of DFW’s consciousness, or a wraith? Or perhaps that he’s a completely “locked in” figure, as in “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” perhaps a victim of The Entertainment, and that the whole narrative after page 17 is some kind of annular repetition of the cartridge? Or of the fungus he ate?
Sounds completely bonkers, I know, but I noticed more than a few instances where people would comment on JOI’s “two sons.” And, there’s the mysterious inability to speak, or to form appropriate facial expressions.
Sorry — I had to express this bizarre notion or else forever keep my peace.
It seemed to me that all of the trouble in expressing himself came much later. People kept remarking on his inappropriate expressions in the last 100 pages or so, but not before that. (Other than Himself, I guess, who seems to see Hal as locked in.) I confess to being completely puzzled as to what causes the change in Hal, but it felt totally sudden to me.
And I think the times they reference two sons they are talking about times pre Hal’s birth when just Orin & Mario are around, or are talking about “his two sons at the academy” which I read as Orin and Hal.
Yeah, I think you’re right. Hal doesn’t seem to connect with anyone during most of the novel. Pemulis, maybe. Mario, to be sure. I’d have to read the book again to catch all the tiny, oblique references to what I mentioned, something that’s not worth it considering this is probably a blind alley from somewhere deep in my own weird brain.
Like you, I am curious to know what happened to Hal to slam him into the cage. Something dramatic, or so it seems.
Overall, I think this is a remarkable book, like nothing I’ve ever read, and I’m perfectly happy to regard it as a complete expression of all the things DFW was trying to communicate. I’m still kind of marvelling at it, playing “what-if” games in my imagination. And yet, I’m completely comfortable with the Mystery that remains at the end of so many threads of the story.
Regarding what happened to Hal, p.896 has me now in the ‘Hal was dosed’ camp.
re: sons, possibility.
One of the 3 sons is not JOI’s bio-kid, or not recognized b/c of his physical attributes. Other times in the work, we are led to overlook or discount persons with “physical difference” as being agents of plot, eg, persons of color at Ennet House as being potential ETA employees (agents in hire of Canadians).
btw, can anyone out there tell me where the term “Nucks” comes from?
Okay, since you’re ignoring the spoiler line, so am I… Caveat Emptor.
In a response to a master’s thesis long ago, DFW admitted to having four “projects” going on in IJ. I believe that one of these projects was to write a book about addiction that would itself be addictive. A second was to structure the book as a , a particular type of fractal. The center of a Serpinski triangle is empty, much like how the IJ the book revolves around IJ the film and its auteur, both of which are essentially missing from the book. We never really find out what makes IJ so interesting and JOI is never really present– he is remembered, we read his writings, we meet his ghost.
Each of the three main subplots, which are bound together by JOI and IJ, also has a question at their center which is left unanswered. What happened to Hal? Will Gately survive and stay sober? Will the Wheelchair Assassins capture IJ and subdue America?
JOI was a founder of the Anti-Confluential school, and IJ the book has an anti-confluential plot. There is the promise that it will all come together eventually, a promise that is supported by endless connections between the characters and subplots. The connections are everywhere and leave the reader with the impression that with closer reading, they can discover the answers to the open questions at the end of the book. So you jump back to the beginning and start over. In this sense the book becomes infinite, and the jest is on you– because the connections don’t lead anywhere conclusive. They are there as a mechanism to suck you back in. I say this having read the book cover to cover four times.
BTW, this doesn’t make me angry or anything– because every time through, I catch things I missed previously, and new ways to look at What It All Means. To me, this is the most intriguing and fun part of the book– trying to figure out DFW’s intentions.
This is a book of truly great depth, one that keeps on giving. It reminds me of the Gass essay at the start of The Recognitions, which tells the reader not to worry about getting everything on the first read– you’ve got the rest of your life to figure it all out (paraphrasing). Infinite Summer has been great for all the other perspectives shared.
That’s my take.
Clearly my attempt to embed a link to a Serpinski Triangle failed miserably. It was supposed to be where the blue text begins in my previous post. Just type “Serpiniski Triangle” into google.
(yeah, spoilers may follow, but if you are worried about that, what the hell are you thinking reading this far in the comments of a spoiler-warned post?)
very much like the post!
My take on why the unresolved ending: Not so much some pomo urge towards incompleteness. If Irony is the Scylla of a project for sincerity, then the fake sincerity of the “very special episode of”/afterschool special neatly tied up dreck is the Charybdis, the thing so saccharine that it risks collapsing your project in the “goo” that Hal uses as a word to protect himself from fake sincerity, even when watching a cartridge he actually likes. (Those afterschool specials were always about real and important issues, things that really did matter, and yet they were so ridiculous in their narrative structure that the seriousness of the issue of the week became mockable). Oh, we so so so want to see Joelle and Gately a happy couple, or Hal finding himself, and I’m not saying that they can’t be, just possibly, down the road a bit. But in this book about the hard struggle to reach some sort of sincerity/honesty/giving of the self, it seems important to end with the focus still being on the ongoing struggle, not the soft-focus happy ending. Sorta for the same reason it is important to have Mikey pop up in the middle of our denouments. If it is true that DFW had to write 700 or 800 pages to get us to a place to be open to the sorts of insights he was interested in, surely he has to be careful about how to bring down the curtain without letting us too easily off the hook we are by now (most of us) so happy to have been caught on. Sure, we wish we knew more, but as that monstrous (and deeply, unforgivably cynical) series of PSA’s of the last decade or two have taught us, sometimes “the more you know” is not the best way to reach toward sincerity in communication.
Great!
i have just finished reading IF and am kicking myself for not buying a copy. I’ve had it out of the library for 5 months, already renewed it 4 times and paid a hefty fine (about the price of the book). I had to rush the end since it’s been reserved by someone else at and it’s overdue again. The problem, as others have said, is that once you get to that last page, you need to start reading it all over again. I missed about half of the actual “plot”, bowled over by language and humor and just plain lost sometimes in the characters. I can’t say I know what happened, but I know that I want to read it again. thank you DFW.
i can ID. started with library, had to get a copy… but still didn’t mark a page. could kick myself. maybe next time.
please don’t kick yourself. you could end up in the hospital with many of our protagonists.
First off, the “ending” should not be a total shock, if for no other reason than that, for the prior 980pp., the plot has been steeped in ambiguity and unanswered questions. It would seem forced if at the end everything was suddenly tied up in a neat resolution.
I am surprised by some of these comments which seem to be forcing some kind of personal notion of what “should” happen into the text. Hal and Gately not really meeting? There are tons of things hinted at throughout the text that point to a sort of “ending,” but we have to keep in my that no story is ever truly over. The end of any book is not the end of the ongoing narrative of the characters’ lives. So, really, what difference does it make if the book ends in mid-action or not? Also, it’s just so painfully obvious that the book itself is annular, and has the same effect as the entertainment, etc.
Last thing, re Gately dying: I took the last line of the novel, the waking up in the sand, to be something that happened not in the book’s present, to the Gately in the hospital, but in the book’s past, to the Gately getting drugged in the apt.
I took the end to mean that Gately died unconscious, during a flashback. I can’t point to anything specific to support that; it’s a feeling, a sense of the tone.
I don’t know that I’ve seen any comments attempting to “force” an ending. People get that the novel is intentionally ambiguous; it’s more that it’s kinda neat exploring the possibilities, and at some point, in whatever unconscious drive to resolution, you start to commit to them. Were I smart about such stuff, I would examine to what degree one’s interpretations/predictions (or cheerful avoidance of them) is a kind of Rorschach test in terms of optimism, cynicism, addictive tendency, and such.
I think the variety of interpretations speaks to the genius of the novel and its engagement with different types of readers. I have found the Lynch comparisons interesting, because I respond to something like “Mulholland Dr” in much the same way I do to “Infinite Jest”–getting (happily) tied up in plot and envisioning what happens off page/screen, yet keeping myself open to gut-level emotional reactions that might defy analysis. Others take high-level philosophical and linguistic routes that I’ll never be capable of.
From my (non-intellectual) perspective, the novel is perfect and complete and exactly what it should be. It is the first I’ve engaged with at such depth (and now over the course of over ten years), and this summer’s group has opened it up even more.
I didn’t mean to imply that there it is pointless or futile to sort through the given information and find support for various theories regarding the “ending” and all of its necessary questions. My gripe was more with people who try to avoid the obvious for the sake of their own comfort. E.g., I am not totally comfortable with the logic of JOI appearing as a wraith to Don Gately, nor with what is apparently a type of prophetic dream that Gately has while in the hospital. But there is little in the text to suggest that those two things are anything more or less than what they are presented as. In other words, I may not like it, but I can find nothing to suggest that the wraith is not really a wraith, and really present in Gately’s room. People try to stretch the book in order to have it “make sense” to them, and I find that kind of argumentation invalid.
I struggled at first with the question of whether Gately died at the end because it certainly feels that way, as you say, from the tone. But then there is Hal at the “beginning” of the book in the Year of Glad remembering he and Donald Gately digging up his father’s head. And plus there didn’t seem to be any indication on the last page of the book proper that the narration has left Gately’s flashback and returned to his present.
Thanks, Kevin, and great posts from everyone. I finished the novel a couple of days ago and couldn’t wait for next week so shot past the spoiler tag to find out what people were thinking.
I was sorry not to have, maybe, another 1,000-page novel that would take Hal from his routine tournament, into rehab, to meet Gately, to have it all collapse (in relapse?) into the opening scene of the novel, then to resolve (but what would that resolution be?) — but I have faith that Gately survives and that Hal and Gately will meet, just as Stephen and Bloom do in “Ulysses,” and I can even foresee that some happiness for Hal will come of this. At least, I want to think so, just as I want to think that Gately and Joelle will hook up, Orin will worm his way free, the wheelchair assassins will fail, Lenz will get caught, Wayne will win the Whataburger, Pemulis will survive and evade and have bleak but ingenious adventures, etc. Wallace doesn’t have to show me any of this.
Gately’s final macabre vision is surely a memory, as Matt Mc says, and we last see him on the beach, the tide way, way out, finally ready to begin the heroic struggle to stay sober.
I believe Lenz met his end in the Antoili bookshop. There was that passage (don’t have my book in front of me) about a wigged man (Lenz) who cut off another Subject’s fingers (a man dressed like a woman, Poor Tony), and tried to pass them off as his own, in order to see the Entertainment again.
Yeah I think Lenz and Poor Tony and probably poor Kate G. probably all get their maps eliminated for keeps (I’ve been looking for a chance to use that expression) at the hands of the Entertainment / A.F.R.
And I also think that John “N.R.” Wayne dies too. Or at least Hal’s mention of him in the Year of Glad seems to suggest that has died, although there is nothing to give us a clue about when or how.
the last line is, i believe, gately hitting rock bottom. he will soon Come In.