Sorry that this update is a little late, but to be on pace you'll probably want to be around page 150 or so to get to 181 by Wednesday. Here are just a few things from the reading that I've found interesting:
- There's a great section from 109-121 where groups of younger tennis kids are talking with their older mentors (and the narrative moves from room to room), and at one point Hal concludes that the reason the school pushes them so hard is that "The suffering unites us"(113)--would you call the kind of hard work the book demands a kind of suffering? Does it unite us as we read it together? Is it better reading this book in groups for that reason? Or not?
- On pages 140-142 there is an essay written by a young Hal that looks at the evolving nature of the hero. Hal ends the essay saying "We await, I predict, the hero of non-action, the catatonic hero, the one beyond calm, divorced from all stimulus, carried here and there across sets by burly extras whose blood sings with retrograde amines." Do any of the characters we've met so far fit this portrait of a hero (or what do you think of this hero)? Or any image of a hero (offered by Hal or our own experience with other literary heroes)? Does Infinite Jest have a hero at all?
- Last but not least, what did you think about the section from 145-151 about why videophones never became popular? Do you agree with DFW?
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