As for the “don’t pull more than your weight” I think it’s not just a running reference, but an underlying theme–what is addiction and desire but the grasping for moremoremore?

The most important item for me is something that may appear naive for you all: the fact that this will all remain for future use and abuse. I’m sure (i.e., I would bet on it) that the ‘archives’ of IS are as infinite as IJ itself. So many thanks to those who had the wild conceit of such an undertaking, for the moment totally unheard of in France, where such undertakings would have necessarily taken on the heavy and despairingly exclusive guise of university research. (No criticism intended of university research here) I feel like saying, singing even: “Only in America, land of opportunity” … but I’ll sign off before that!
Thanks ever so much for this golden opportunity. As soon as my ‘paper’ for the French press is ready, I’ll send it along, along with a bad translation.

This is also what made Pynchon’s “Against the Day” work for me a couple of years ago, and although most critics wished it had been pruned way back (one wrote that, had the novel concentrated on its out-West revenge plot, it would have been “the book of the year”), Pynchon had so much great stuff going on at so many levels that less would just have been less. That said, I think IJ is even better — and I’m looking forward to 2666, which looks at first glance like the same kind of book.

Yes. Yesyesyesyesyesyes. That’s it. Exactly.

“Let the figurants speak.” Right, thank you. It reminds you that everyone has a story. Mikey, my God — I wish there was a book just about the Pemulis family.

Eden, my wife sometimes referred to herself this summer as an #infsum widow. She’s glad this thing is over too.

Having read the book, it is hard to remember that Gately is initially introduced as just one of these character sketches (Even though I had been to a reading, right about when (I think actally before) the novel came out where DFW read the Gately burglary scene, I did not, on my first read, realize that he was going to be so central to the novel my first time through.) Because of that first chapter and its first person narration, you sure as heck expect Hal to be central* The way the book encourages you to remain connected to the quasi-figurants of Ennet, one of whom comes to dominate the emotional experience of the book (um, I mean Gately, not Lenz) is amazing to me not only as a practical narrative device but as a very affecting “This is Water” attempt not to let us forget that Gately and Hal are only two of a huge number of people working their way through their own challenges.** Imagine the experience of the climactic fight and its aftermath if you lacked the early character sketches of many of the ETA residents, or had known from page 3 (or even page 203) that Gately was such a central character.***

*And, through ETA, you even have a bit of a structure to assume that his relation to other students there will matter (For example, the main introduction/”character sketch” scene of his peers is the Big Buddy section that inter-relates Pemulis, Troeltsch, etc to each other. Even when we finally get the equivalent at Ennet House, through the gripe sessions to Gately or the “Gately on the couch” scene, things remain largely anonymous or difficult to make connections between.)

**Which commenters on the forum have pointed out probably explains why DFW insists on giving us interludes with “Mikey” or Barry Loach even in the very latest parts of the Novel, giving tangible, “Identifiable” form to the wraith’s monologic theories about letting the figurants speak .

***Yes, I know Gately is mentioned in Hal’s first chapter, but it seems pretty clear from the responses I’ve seen to that chapter that this doesn’t single him out too obviously for most readers in the early going of the novel.