skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Infinite Ephs Week 1 (pgs 3-95)
It's time to start reading! Hopefully you've already picked up your copy of Infinite Jest. This week we'll be reading pages 3-95 (don't forget the footnotes), and here are a few things to start thinking about:
- Hal is the first character we meet, and anyone who has been on any sort of interview knows how he feels in that first scene. But something odd is going on and we're not quite sure what it is--why does the book open in this particular way? Does anything about scene cause us to read the book in any particular way?
- The devil's in the details! This book is so dense that it's easy to miss how intricate it is as well. Be on the look out for words and images that pop up in multiple story lines (or in the footnotes). The first one that comes to mind is "spider" or spider-related words, but keep your eyes peeled (another example would be the filmography). What other words do you see popping up? And why might they be emphasized in this way?
- And finally a trivia question: Does anyone know where the title Infinite Jest comes from? Why would that be important?
Post any of your comments or questions here as you read along and get the discussion going.
I'm pretty sure I read on the wikipedia page that the title comes from a Shakespeare play, Hamlet if I recall correctly. Unfortunately I haven't read Hamlet, but as you guys will find out if you don't know already, the book deals with entertainment in America and the American conception of happiness. There is a great line, though, where Steeply and Marathe are speaking about the Incandenza's movie "Infinite Jest." Steeply says, "Theory's that with a really sophisticated piece of holography you'd get the neural density of an actual stage play without losing the selective realism of the viewer-screen. That the density plus the realism might be too much to take" (491 [paperback]). This last line in particular I found to be a wink of self-reference from DFW.
ReplyDelete