David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest by Stephen J. Burn

Author:Stephen J. Burn [Burn, Stephen J.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2016-01-31T03:44:18.666144+00:00

That Hal’s loss of control over his addiction, then, is carefully timed to coincide with his loss of control over the expressions that should be most personal to him is presumably intended as a literal manifestation of the disintegration of the last of his inner core of self. The inner gaze on November 8 reveals only emptiness, and with this recognition comes the inevitability of defeat in his efforts to limit his addiction, and estrangement from the self follows. But while Hal’s alcoholic father and grandfather have bequeathed their addiction to him, as outlined above, they have also passed down a sporting philosophy that depends upon the extinction of the idea of an “inner” self. At this point the significance of Hal’s concurrent competitive explosion and his descent into addiction emerges: both draw on the same erasure of self. Shortly after Hal has reflected on his past year’s growth, in a passage that is both heavily shadowed by the ghost of his father (his family name “Himself” recurs, while his initials, J. O. I., are played on) and clearly designed to echo the novel’s fourth sentence, Hal describes this empty self:

Hal himself hasn’t had a bona fide intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion since he was tiny; he finds terms like joie and value to be like so many variables in rarified equations, and he can manipulate them well enough to satisfy everyone but himself that he’s in there, inside his own hull, as a human being—but in fact he’s far more robotic than John Wayne. . . . inside Hal there’s pretty much nothing at all, he knows (694, last emphasis mine)

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.