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Wallace:David:Infinite Jest

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

This is the start of a MetaWeb annotation for David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, a brilliant 1996 novel that has captured the minds and souls of hundreds, if not thousands, of people.

Active discussion of the book happens often on wallace-l, a mailing list that averages 100 messages per week. Because wallace-l includes discussion of Wallace's many other writings, though, as well as Wallace's career and a number of tangential topics, you may not wish to subscribe until you've had a look at the archives.

There are many scattered resources on the Internet that deal with the book, but the most comprehensive one is The Howling Fantods. There is also a character guide, a scene-by-scene guide to the book, an index, and an essay about the drafts of the book.

Plus, there are many Wallace:David:Infinite_Jest:Reviews of the book.

Detailed discussion of the book

There are several ways to approach this metaweb. At the most detailed level, there is a page-by-page commentary on the book, that's either original to MetaWeb or comes from the various group re-reads of the book by posters on wallace-l. Here is the master list: Wallace:David:Infinite_Jest:page-by-page commentary

At the second level of abstration, there are pages that deal with themes or characters or other larger issues about the book. You can hunt down information by character: Wallace:David:Infinite_Jest:character commentary and by theme or topic, although that'll take a while for the MetaWeb to fill in: Wallace:David:Infinite_Jest:Themes

Finally, at a third level of abstration, there is discussion about the book's authorship, Wallace:David:Infinite_Jest:Authorship, choices of narrative voice, Wallace:David:Infinite_Jest:Narrator, use of literary themes, Wallace:David:Infinite_Jest:Literature, and of course its footnotes: Wallace:David:Infinite_Jest:Footnotes.

Pending Questions

Finally, the book is complicated and intentionally ambiguous, so that readers are often mystified by the thing. There is a master list of Wallace:David:Infinite_Jest:Pending Questions.