This is the first of a four-part roundtable discussion with the Infinite Summer Guides.
Infinite Summer: How about that ending, huh?
Matthew Baldwin: I found the ending to be incredible. Literally quote “incredible”, as in straining credulity, as in: despite the vast expanse of white space between the final sentence and the “981”, I was like “I’m going to turn this page and find an epilogue or a coda or an Animal-House-closing-credits-style litany of what happens to all the characters in the future (“Ann Kittenplan became a marketing director for NoCoat Incorporated …”)
Eden M. Kennedy: Gately becomes a government actuary! Lenz gets eaten by bears!
MB: After that passed, my second reaction was a sort of amorphous, anxious “Oh great, now I’m going to have to do a ‘Oprah/James Frey’ sort of deal where I haul the wraith of DFW onto this website and publicly confront him about this colossal scam he pulled, to which I was an unwitting party”.
Then I slept for about nine hours.
Then I woke up and thought the ending was pretty good.
Kevin Guilfoile: I wouldn’t have had the guts to end it that way. As a reader I thought it was extremely effective and moving and entirely consistent with the rest of the novel. But the author’s relationship with the text is so different from the reader’s. He knows what he’s trying to do. He knows all the stuff he thought about putting in there, but didn’t. It’s so difficult for a writer of even a fairly linear novel to understand exactly how the reader will receive it, and to leave so much unsaid shows a startling amount of confidence. He’s giving great credit to the reader, and for me it really paid off, although I also understand the people who are frustrated with it. He asks the reader to do a tremendous amount of work from the get go and when the novel’s over the work isn’t over.
MB: The “work isn’t over” aspect I like. By giving us the “shave and a haircut” and foregoing the “two bits”, Wallace leaves us feeling like we’re perpetually in the middle of the novel, even after we’ve ostensibly finished. The hidden meaning of the title is now clear: the jest is that the book is infinite, in that it has no end.
Avery Edison: I was pretty unmoved by it, to be honest (well, except for being a little miffed at yet another poor depiction of gender-variant people in the Asian “fags dressed up as girls”.) As the novel drew to a close I became less concerned about it having a cracking ending — it’s such a fractured and structureless book that expecting or anticipating something as conventional as an ending that ties up loose ends seemed pointless, and my mental energy was better spent just enjoying the ride as a whole.
I’m afraid I don’t share Greg Carlisle’s opinion that “the depth of the last sentence [is] unparalleled in literature”. Oh, wait — unless we’re meant to be unsure if the “and when he came back to” refers to the Fackelmann incident, or Gately’s coma. If that was the case then it would indeed be quite interesting. Oh, now I’ve gone and confused myself.
I did appreciate the symmetry in the endnotes — we start with definitions of drugs, and we end with definitions of drugs. Which mean that I could read all those last few endnotes at once and not have to leave the main story as I plowed through the last pages.
EMK: I loved the ending. I thought it was incredibly emotionally satisfying. We already knew that Gately had reached a turning point on that beach and that from that point forward he would begin to make heroic efforts to change his life. So I loved exactly seeing how he got there, even though witnessing that last binge was brutal. You know what the ending made me think of? That E-chord at the end of the Beatles’ “A Day In the Life” — that long sustained chord that just slowly fades out until you hear the piano bench creak under John’s butt. That’s what reading Gately on the Beach felt like.
MB: Holy hell, I think you win “analogy of the summer” with that one, Eden. What a sublime comparison.
EMK: Well, seriously, that’s exactly the sound that went through my mind as I imagined Gately lying there. The other thing is, giving him the last word also made Gately seem like the hero of the whole book, which was kind of unexpected. I thought we’d end with Hal watching the Entertainment, which would explain why he had to be propped up during the interview at the beginning of the book. But my powers of literary divination often let me down.
KG: One of the critical knocks against Wallace is that he has a disregard for the reader. I think the fact that he pulls that ending off (at least to my mind) shows he is about as attuned to the reader as any writer I know.
EMK: I think that he was attuned, or that in writing this novel he was trying to attune himself, to the human heart, almost desperately sometimes. As I was reading this book I would occasionally wonder about the title: Jest? Is this supposed to be funny? And now that I’m done I can look back and see that it is, it’s a wonderfully funny book, if you use like the nineteenth dictionary definition of funny. Like: “slows you down and lets you to pay attention to things you’d ordinarily zip by, that if you just took the time to really see them they’d make you smile in this really deeply loving way.” (That’s what my dictionary says, anyway.) The scene that sums up this thought entirely for me is when Stice’s forehead is stuck to the window. He’s just stuck there for hours, thinking. And then Hal walks up and they have this little chat. No rush. Well, maybe we should try to get you off this thing, what do you say? Uh, okay.
And I still think Zac Ephron should play Mario.
My feelings toward the ending seem to reflect the general trend. I wasn’t expecting a traditional ending, but I was expecting some sense of resolution, so I was a little ambivalent. But the more I thought about the more I liked it. Yesterday, I realized that not giving a traditional ending was a gift. I’m not sure if IJ would have such a lasting impact on people if the ending was traditional. Last night I dreamt in Foster Wallace.
The Day in the Life analogy just made me like that last sentence about 30X more. Extending the analogy, the impact of the novel is like the loop that ends Sgt. Pepper. It really “never could be any other way.”
I wanted it to end, so I would know HOW it would end. I wanted a tidy wrap-up for Gately because I felt like he deserved it. And then it ended, but I don’t know exactly how, so I wanted it to keep going. What an infinite loop.
At the end, I found myself wishing I had access to the extra 500*-or-so pages of extra material that got whittled away during the editing process. Seriously. I wanted it to be more infinite than it already is.
* Those obsessed with details can insert the actual number of supposed extra pages here.
Yep. That’s pretty much how I felt. It was such a joy, in the middle of the book, to see all these random weird bits start to coalesce into something grand, and then… it’s like DFW finished writing the Gately thing and was just too tired to continue.
(a reposting of a post that was not in appropriate place)
Now that I’ve “came back to” (p. 981): The ending makes a interesting–and good–impression on me. I’m with it all the way. At first I thought of the very beginnings of us as land animals crawling out of the ocean–so a representing a beginning. We’re ready to remake the world now that this other world has ended and another begins. The border aspect–Gately on the border between land and sea– figures strongly here. The end of the story as well as the imagery in it’s last sentence is a jumping off place–into a being-without-the-book, if you will, being-outside-the-book into our being alone with ourselves again into well, just being. Yet, “in my end is my beginning”-style there are the footnotes, a running commentary on the being, the content of the book just as when we are alone with our being our thoughts should, in the sense of the observing ego, be a running commentary on our being/actions–thereby keeping us from the dreaded “default setting”.
I think it’s brilliant that it’s cold and raining because as the book and it’s world leaves me, it does feel like warmth and life are now withdrawing in the opposite direction and I have no choice but to plunge forward over that border into being and start swimming.
I’d really like to know if anyone else feels this kind of YOU are part of the ending and it just keeps reverberating as you are travelling forward in time away from the book now saying this is water, this is water.
I think Gately is quite clearly the hero. If addiction is the cage, he shows you the Gate.
“We already knew that Gately had reached a turning point on that beach and that from that point forward he would begin to make heroic efforts to change his life.”
I’m trying to find a page number on this – anyone have one?
Did I imagine that? Gately talks about sleeping on the beach at one point, and he had that childhood thing with the ceiling at the beach house. Is it in a footnote?
i don’t think you did – i just want to make sure this tied up the way i thought it did. my impression was he woke up from that bender on the beach.
I can’t find it either, but it rings true. Any encyclopedic minds out there with the exact locale? Huh, the idea of a photographic memory ala Hal and reading this book just popped into my head. Imagine having recall of this 24/7. Holy cow.
My kingdom for a Kindle!
Gately’s fevered dream recollection of the tornado exploding the beach house is at p.816, right after Ewell leaves (amazon search function is free!). Cf. 809, the roof had a huge hole in it. I didn’t pick up any special beachly significance that points to p.981. Maybe there’s other refs, but go ahead and re-read the passage, since it has the amazing image: “It looked as if the clouds were either giving birth or taking a shit.”
I’ve thought about this to distraction and I’m not sure about the ending — right for the book, but maybe not right for the reader? Or this reader? There’s just too much blank space between Gately waking up on the beach and Hal blowing up in his college interview. Too much happens, none of which we get to see. But the ending did make me start again at the beginning, so that’s something.
Plus one for EK’s chord comparison. I took the advice of various commenters here and on the fora and re-read chapter 1 and when I did, it all dropped into place for me. Rather, enough parts dropped into place to assuage the ReadeRage I had the first time I read it. A supposedly fun thing indeed.
And what doing that helped me do is understand where the scenelet Hal mentions of he, Gately and John (N.R.) Wayne digging up Himself’s head a) fits in the book’s narrative and b) where that fit into Hal’s personal narrative. The two protagonists have finally come together on the stage in their first physical encounter with the antogonist, both driven by a different facet of the same reason … the need to lay to rest Himself’s legacy by either proving or disproving the existence of the one final hold Himself had on all of the characters in the book.
To Robert Chatain’s point “too much blank space…” I sort of filled in the blanks after rereading Chap. 1. The AFR/seperatistes were successful in rounding up all of the players … Gately, PGOAT, Orin, Hal. Bringing them all together finally put all of the pieces together on the table. Gately and Hal working to dig up the head as the Canadian John Wayne stood guard revealed no Anti-Entertainment.
In that context, Hal blowing the interview is an act of independence (albeit a twisted one). After a life of being told what he is and isn’t, being forced to perform, even having his very existence questioned by his father on a random basis, Hal’s rage/phreak-out/whatever is the physical manifestation of him breaking free from his own personal Entertainment.
Just now, however, I finally get how and why the book ended with Gately. His “bottom”, like everything else in the book, happens at almost 180 degrees off what we would expect … a bottom event in which the potential of the universe is opened? Not what I’d expect and certainly not what DFW’s addicts in recovery spent 981 pages prepping us for. Gately’s bottom (heh heh) is the real beginning of the Gately story and, in a way, the beginning of the action that leads us to the end of the story (which just so happens to be buried, along with Himself) in the last place we’d expect it … the beginning of the story.)
So, who’s up for one more read. Anyone?
You’re forgetting that Hal purposely injures himself to avoid taking part in the tennis tournament with the (unknown to him) AFR.
I mostly agree with you; where I disagree is on the point that Hal “intentionally” blows the interview. I think Hal is finally being authentic in the opening scene with the deans, which is why he makes little to no sense to anyone else in the room.
–Todeswalzer.
“You’re forgetting that Hal purposely injures himself to avoid taking part in the tennis tournament with the (unknown to him) AFR.”
Do you have a page number for this? I had assumed that he doesn’t take part in the tournament because he really does need to be in the hospital (whether he ate the DMZ or his condition just worsened, I’m not sure.) What makes you think he purposely injured himself? I might have just missed this.
” think Hal is finally being authentic in the opening scene with the deans, ” actually, I think that’s more what I meant. His responses are genuine despite his knowing that a different set of answers, glibly delivered, would have smoothed the entire thing over and achieved the desired (by some in the room) end. It ended up feeling to me like his Ego was finally planting a flag on the outside … “I am in here.”
I am one of the “re-readers,” one of those annoying people who gets almost evangelistic about it and the pleasures of re-reading it.* Here’s my end-of-IS take on why I like the unresolved ending (I mean, aside from its raw beauty, which Eden is totally right in her description of). A lot of posters in the last few weeks have talked about that familiar urge to re-read, if not the whole book, then at least that opening chapter again when they finish. And, yeah, part of the urge to do that is to figure out what the hell happened, but if all the re-readers wanted was fun little mind game of figuring out the timeline or the clues to who had the Entertainment or whatever, we’d poke through the book a bit, then go do crosswords or whatever. What I want is an excuse to spend more time with the sort of sensibility I find in the book — not just DFW’s sensibility, but the sensibility and struggles of Hal, Gately, Joelle, Pemulis, Mario, Kate, Green, etc. And the puzzles and disconnects and the tantalizing mystery of how we get to the Year of Glad is the excuse to dive in and do this.
I mean, when you think about it, no matter how much you love a book or a movie, it is usually pretty hard to just jump right back into it when you finish, because our pleasure seems to be linked to things like narrative or anticipation or suspense. Without some new question or unresolved something-or-other, it usually ain’t so much fun to re-watch the finale episode of your favorite TV show the second you finish, but give it a while so you can forget a few things or come up with a few unresolved questions, and suddenly it seems like time to go watch it again.** I recently read that the old “pleasure center” theory of dopamine in the brain that a lot of you probably remember from some undergrad psych course is now thought of this way: The whole circuit actually works more like a “seeking” circuit, where the reward for finding the food pellet or whatever is a mental jolt that encourages us to stay involved/engaged in the hunt or puzzle or whatever.*** This made instant sense to me in terms of things like novels, because it explained why it can be so unrewarding to dive back into your very favorite things right away — if nothing is at stake, then it is tough going. On a superficial level, DFW has offered me a puzzle to give my primate puzzle-loving brain a challenge, and the secret but more important result is that I get to spend more time in the presence of sensibilities that are valuable to me in ways much deeper than I could easily explain. And that’s quite an accomplishment.
* This endnote is also my conclusion: What better way to find new reasons to enjoy slowly re-reading IJ, despite the added weight of the loss of DFW, then to have all the guides and posters of IS giving me an excuse both to take it slow and to challenge the things I thought I knew or had forgotten.
**Have avoided all summer my urge to find ways to link Wallace-verse to the Whedon-verse, and will do you all the favor of continuing to fight that urge.
***Despite having taken some courses in recent years that probably should have exposed me to this shift in the research, it was actually a Temple Grandin Book on animal behavior (Animals In Translation) that did it, but it seems like her sources check out.
well said. this was my first time through the book, but i have a sneaking suspicion that i’m about to join the ranks of the re-readers. i thought the end was esthetically pleasing / haunting – in a few ways similar to the last scene of requiem for a dream
Consider this line, which occurs near the midpoint of the novel: “And his dreams late that night, after the Braintree/Bob Death Commitment, seem to set him under a sort of sea, at terrific depths, the water all around him silent and dim and the same temperature he is” (p. 449). This occurs at the other end of Gately’s ellipse. In contrast to the hospital room delirium blurring into memories of his highest high/lowest low with Fax & C, here Gately is described as finally sober long enough to start re-experiencing the memories of his mother and childhood.
I think this line and the last line on p. 981 share a lot in common in representing Gately’s internal states at these moments: The tremendous pressure of “terrific depths” but the warm comfort of the “same temperature” versus the above-water freedom of the tide being “way out” but the sad isolation of awaking on “freezing sand” in the rain. What a poetic suggestion of both the burden and relief of both sobriety and disease. And, as I found on this re-read, even though traditional elements of resolution are absent, some strands are tied together in remarkable ways.
Eden, you are totally rockin’ this post! One chuckle I’ve come to expect from reading you, but every time you jump in here, it’s with perfect timing and insight. Thanks!
Avery said: “I was pretty unmoved by it . . . As the novel drew to a close I became less concerned about it having a cracking ending — it’s such a fractured and structureless book that expecting or anticipating something as conventional as an ending that ties up loose ends seemed pointless, and my mental energy was better spent just enjoying the ride as a whole.”
I think you nailed it. I enjoyed the final images and passages, but I do not feel there was an intended “ending.” It’s more than the book “ending,” and more about DFW pulling a great stunt: he got us all giddy about going back and rereading passages and (for some) the entire thing! This is the “cracking ending”! Joke’s on us, eh?
It’s one thing to enjoy a cool trick (as a reader in this case); it’s quite another to create it (as DFW did in this case. The man is shrewd. You can dislike the “end”, but gotta admit, it’s a damn clever book–“ending” and all.
Question (probably off topic):
Since we can be pretty sure that Orin was the one sending out copies of the Entertainment, can we assume that he was the one who initially stole the master from JOI’s grave/head? That would explain Marathe asking about where the master is buried during Orin’s last scene.
Why do you think it was Orin? I think I missed something. That was a great scene, though, with the roaches and Orin in the tumbler…
It was definitely Orin mailing the Entertainment: the men who received copies were all former lovers of Avril’s.
Well, I was thinking it might be Orin because he would have had to have access to the master in order to be sending out copies. Unless there was more than one master, but I didn’t think that was an option.
Oh my gosh, Eden, I had the exact same thought. When I got to the last sentence I sat there with my mouth open for a little bit, then shut the book and went into the kitchen, in both a post-gigantic-achievement daze and also in a little bit of shock. Sitting there watching the kettle warm up I started to think about the crescendo of “A Day In The Life.” I just sort of let it play in my head until it got to the final chord. Then I went back into the living room and opened the book back up to the first page.
Honestly, the experience of reading Infinite Jest has changed me. I couldn’t even tell you how but I just recognize that feeling that I get after certain books. I know that I’ll never, ever look at the world in the same way again. And I know that these characters will be in my head and heart for the rest of my life.
Same here. It moved me on a level that few other pieces of art have. The only thing that comes to mind, in terms of something having a similar impact, is Six Feet Under.
I feel so ambivalent about the whole book. There were times when the text was all I could think about, and I found that everything I did was somehow linking to IJ. Then, other times, it was really hard to get myself to finish 11 pages a day. I think if I’d read the book normally, I would have sort of a “meh” impression of the whole thing. Somehow, though, living with the text for a few months let it grow on me. Now, I feel like I need to mull the ending for a while to really decide what I think of it. Not inclined to re-read any time soon, though.
[…] I have more quotes of the day for you from the novel itself, today I give you a pastiche of the Guides’ synergy at the end of this fascinating, compelling, and comforting summer of […]
I think the book’s structure as a whole, as well as the ending, are much more like Her Majesty than A Day In The Life. For the Beatles nerds out there (like me). 🙂
Well said, Matt. There are definitely a few doses of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”, “Helter Skelter”, and “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” before we get to “Her Majesty,” though. 🙂
“It’s more than the book “ending,” and more about DFW pulling a great stunt…”
****
Wallace said many times that if that was the impression readers got, then he had failed miserably as a writer.
Yeah, bad choice of words: “stunt.” I can see how that would offend a literary genius like Wallace. I’m a mathematician–not a man of words.
Call it what you want, but DFW has every one of us on a quest to figure out what’s going on at the “end” of the book.
What would you call that?
I think he’s succeeded brilliantly as a writer, but I’m not so sure that ending felt brilliant to me. I loved the book, though it was hard… I learned, as Gately did, to “Keep Coming Back.”
And then, one night, when I came back, there was a lock on the door, with a photocopy of a Martin Johnson Heade painting taped to it. What? That’s it? I mean, it’s a beautiful painting and all, but after all that about coming back, about getting out of your head and making real connections with the sad and beautiful human beings around you, this is what I’m left with? This bleak little beach painting?
Do you feel the same way if you think of the bleak little beach painting as the beginning of the story, not the end?
Yes, a bit. But if I knew this was the beginning of a story, I’d know anything could happen, and I’d expect to get a whole story.
In this case I feel like I got 3/4 of a really incredible novel, plus a bonus haiku. Now I have the choice to either decide that DFW did this on purpose in order to teach me something, or blow my mind, or whatever — or I can decide that it’s just not that great of an ending. I have to admit feeling a bit ripped off.
Another way to think about it: All the things Gately suddenly remembers give us, among other things, a very parallel tale to Hal’s, including an odd childhood, a suicide of a sorta-parent figure during that childhood, a promising athletic career brought to a standstill by the combination of life circumstances and a serious drug habit at age 17. In most books, two parallel characters like this would probably end up “ending” their stories in “real time” together, which tends to make it really hard to avoid sorta casting them as dark/light good/evil right-choosing/ wrong-choosing dualities. Here, we still do that a bit (hey, we’re human!), but we are also encouraged to see these two people as being (not to mention a large number of others such as Joelle, Pemulis, the Ennet House crew, etc) in different stages of struggles that are similar but unique, such that any of them might be on the verge of making choices that ultimately turn them towards a myriad of good or bad possible futures. You can feel for Hal (or Kate or Green or etc) without having to cast them purely as a polar doppelgangers to the sort of hopeful chance at goodness, even nobility, that Gately seems to have stumbled into.
“A Day in the Life” fits the work so well – but I was thinking more (everything under the sun is in tune, but the sun is eclipsed by the moon.)
Try giving “Eclipse” a listen while you read over the last passage.