This might be too obvious to even mention. But I just finished IJ, and have, well, no perspective on, uh, anything... Obviously, the title "Infinite Jest" has layers upon layers of meaning. When I got to the "end" (frustrated, feeling betrayed, and ultimately, confused) all I wanted to do was hunt around in the beginning (The Year of Glad) to figure out what happened (in YDAU). And then I realized. The structure of the novel is nonlinear, buutttt if the beginning of IJ were chopped off and affixed to the end, yes, the book would've been jumpy, the way memories are, but DFW would have been taking us from The Beginning of the Story to The End of the Story. I forgave DFW when I realized that the end is at the beginning, that the structure of the book strongly suggests that the reader go back and reread, starting from page 1. Where, then, to stop? There's no clear endpoint where it would dawn on the reader that, ah, now everything makes sense. And so you keep reading, ad infinitum. And that's damn clever on DFW's part. (Spelling out the obvious in my attempt to process it all, the parallel here is to both the result of viewing and the actual content of The Entertainment, i.e. the woman who murders you is your next life's mother--you are reincarnated eternally, each manifestation of your existence contains a sort of tragic irony in your callow loyalty to the person who killed you, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.)
DFW also wins deep points for choosing The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment as the penultimate chapter of the story. The Depend Adult Undergarment (thematically) hearkens the cyclicality of human existence, from diapers to diapers (to diapers to diapers). This is not to say that DFW actually believes in reincarnation, but he seems to be suggesting that we are replaced by human beings just like us, that each generation is recursively similar to the previous in terms of its needs and desires, that even though each individual is trapped in his/her own subjective experience, we are all connected by a common lifeblood and destiny. (Woohoo, death!)
All that being said, dammit, I still don't know what happened to Hal. And I'm beginning to think that it's intentionally hidden from the reader.... Perhaps this (too) has something to do with the draw of The Entertainment (because, as we know from the rise and fall of videophones, human beings are obsessed with appearances). The veiled actress with the perfect (naked) body fatally intrigues the viewer precisely because he/she can't see the PGOAT's face. Even though you've experienced the cartridge once and know that the veil won't be lifted, you feel as though there has to be something beneath it that goes beyond ordinary, commercial beauty. You therefore are irrationally compelled to view the cartridge again and again to discover what's so damn compelling about a face you cannot see. SO. It could be that DFW was intentionally hiding the answer to the question posed by the first few pages of IJ (What's the reason for Hal's catatonic stupor? Why is he stuck inside himself, unable to communicate with his fellow human beings?) in order to make the novel infinitely compelling. AND. In order to make some point about how the tragic flaw of human nature is the juvenile way in which we become addicted to things just because they are hidden, the way we believe that there's some sort of non-mythological perfect happiness available beneath banal and sometimes ugly surface reality. Thus we ingest dangerous-sounding chemical compounds whose effects are unknown.
The irony, of course, is that drugs, along with other addictive activities like commercial consumption, competition (in sports, grammar, politics, whatever), reading really long books with lots of footnotes, and so on, all serve to make us regress further and further into ourselves and therefore further and further away from other human beings. What's brilliant about AA, which Gately realizes, is that the program offers canned phrases through which genuine communication and identification can eventually occur. These platitudes offer a reason to get up in the morning--"Keep coming back!"--the promise of a shared experience, rather than an infinitely isolating one, and moreover, a shared experience that itself confronts the issue of human separatedness by explicitly teaching grown adults how to identify with one another. The 12-step program and its simple language, along with Ennet House's curfews and common meals--both are necessarily paternalistic. Identifying with others is something we should've learned from our parents, but alas, I think DFW makes his point clear that even the privileged have a shitty and alienating childhoods, that our parents are not fit to be our teachers because they are driven by a (juvenile) pursuit of an impossible happiness that renders them, um, juvenile, and incapable of educating their offspring. The kids grow up, and fall into the their parents' patterns. (Infinitely!) To bring this back to Hal. JOI's father couldn't communicate with his son; his sole attempt to do so is rambling and evasive. More extremely, JOI can only communicate in images, and even then, only ambiguously (think: Hal's interpretation of Accomplice! v. that offered by the filmography footnote). Though we readers are (necessarily) not apprised of how he got there, we know that Hal is doomed to a permutation of his father's (and his father's father's) fate.
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