Having said that, I’m at page 227 and determined not to turn back, despite some of the challenges of the text. However, there is so much great stuff juxtaposed with the difficult that I’m compelled forward.

I recently read “The Empty Plenum,” DFW’s review of /Wittgenstein’s Mistress/ (from the late-80s or early-90s), and something he wrote there strikes me as pertinent here. The quote: “Rarely is our uncritical inheritance of early Wittgensteinian and Logical Positivist models so obvious as in our academic and aesthetic preference that successful fiction encloses rather than opens up, organizes facts rather than undermines them, diagnoses rather than genuflects” (pg. 234).

DFW’s stuff that I’ve read so far leads me to believe that he (as writer) embraced the idea that successful fiction should open up rather than constrict (as opposed to, say, narratives that end with an explanation and a wrap-up), undermine fact rather than organize it, and genuflect rather than diagnose. /IJ/’s ending definitely sends the reader back to the beginning to look for clues, opens up the narrative rather than closes it, etc. Either that, or the ending makes you scream and scream and search madly for some small and defenseless creature to kick … because that’s kind of person who doesn’t go back to the beginning and read again: a cowardly animal-abuser.

Again, I’m not sure what all the foregoing means (i.e., haven’t more than the merest shadow of the hell of an idea what early-Wittgenstein and Logical Positivist models even are), but it does seem germane to the question of what kind of implicit, writerly promise DFW is making with /IJ/’s first 10 pages.

That is, is DFW promising to tell us what ‘happens’ to Hal? In my opinion, no, because I don’t think that’s the kind of book he set out to write.

Rather, I think DFW’s promise to the reader is two-fold: First, there’s everything Kevin wrote about; i.e., the promise of excellent, well-crafted, entertaining, smart prose. Second, there’s the promise that the question asked of Hal at the end of the first 10 pages — “So, yo, man, what’s your story?” — will be answered in the story that follows.

In my opinion, then, myself falling lock-step into early-Wittgensteinian and Logical Positivist models of rhetoric and wrapping up this late-stage, little comment, DFW definitely keeps his latter fold of the two-fold promise in that (it seems to me, more and more) Hal is /IJ/’s narrator and the book in our hands is “his story” — as promised.

Prove it? I’d rather just make the bald assertion. Seriously.

I just wanted to give you some support for a tough position. I finished reading IJ a few months back after bringing it on a beach vacation and then needing another few weeks to finish it. My wife had seen me working through it all that time and when I announced that I was done, she asked, “Was it worth it?”

I responded, “I’m not sure.”

I could say with some authority that I had just read an epic work of the most talented writer of his generation and that it was one of a handful of the best pieces of fiction I had ever read. I could say for certain that I enjoyed reading it immensely. But I couldn’t say for certain that it all was worth the hours of effort I put into it.

Ultimately IJ isn’t about satisfaction. It’s deep and funny and thought-provoking and wonderfully complex. But if IJ were a meal, it would be the kind that makes you hungrier the more you eat.