Infinite Jest

Some of the characters in Infinite Jest are easy to map onto the characters in Hamlet. For instance, after James Incandenza dies, his brother-in-law Charles Tavis slips easily into his place as the headmaster of E.T.A. Charles Tavis also seems to have a longstanding sexual relationship with his own adoptive sister, Avril, that has been going on for years (he is almost certainly Mario's biological father). In this tangle of relationships and power dynamics, James is clearly Hamlet's dead father. He even appears to some characters in the novel as a "wraith," or ghost. Meanwhile, it is easy to see Gertrude in Avril and Claudius in Charles Tavis. Plenty of other characters and relationships seem to be inspired by Hamlet in more complicated ways. For example, Hal, Orin, Mario, and Gately all have moments when they act like Prince Hamlet himself. Joelle resembles Ophelia, but so do other characters who die by suicide and leave their loved ones behind, blaming themselves.

The Incandenzas are powerful within the world of elite youth tennis and even (largely by accident) in the political world. Still, they are a bit pathetic to be serious royals in the way Hamlet represents the royal family of Denmark. Whereas Hamlet famously frets over "something rotten in the state of Denmark," Hal spends most of the novel fretting over the rotten tooth in his mouth. While many people at Ennet House are struggling to stay alive in the face of major systemic injustice, the Incandenzas treat their obsessions—grammar, youth tennis, bad experimental film—as though the stakes are just as high. In a sense, the stakes really are that high. James tries increasingly absurd kinds of performance art to connect with his son. When it all fails, he microwaves his own head. Absurdity notwithstanding, Wallace makes clear that Hal's relationship with his father and his death holds all the love, trauma, and confusion of a more "serious" father-son relationship.

The title of the novel is a clue to what Wallace is doing with allegory and parody. In Shakespeare's play, Hamlet remembers a long-dead court jester, Yorick, as a "fellow of infinite jest." This scene is famous for the way it depicts death as the thing that finally saves everyone, poor and rich alike, from the injustices of life. Now that he is dead, Yorick's social rank doesn't matter; he can be remembered simply as the man who always made people laugh. James Incandenza is a parody of Yorick in that his legacy is a dark practical joke—he literally entertains people to death. Wallace uses this and other parodies of Hamlet to suggest that humans are all the same in life as well as in death. No matter how "well-off" any of the characters are, and no matter how trivial their concerns seem, they are all doomed to spend their lives finding ways to numb themselves or otherwise deal with the pain of being alive.

For most of the book, it seems impossible that The Entertainment could really be so entertaining that people watch it "infinitely," dying before getting up from the screen. However, when the novel finally reveals the actual content of the film, everything begins to make more sense. The film seems to capture people's attention not through beautiful sets, well-developed characters, or any of the elements often associated with good entertainment. Rather, it demands that people think about their relationships with their mothers and how the maternal relationship has played out, over and over again, in their lives. The thesis of the film is that everyone is repeatedly destroyed by the same woman to whom they form their original, most important attachment. Anyone who watches the film gets lost forever reflecting on how this pattern applies to them.

One of the strengths of Infinite Jest (the novel) is that it is extraordinarily sympathetic to most of its characters. Even when they are ridiculous and sometimes disturbing caricatures, the novel insists that they are human underneath it all. Earnest self-reflection and acceptance (often outside of formal therapy) are the most important tools that help characters deal with the horrors of the world and reconnect with their inner humanity. Hal, for instance, makes a promising breakthrough when he admits to Mario that he has been using marijuana to cope with trauma. The novel is difficult and graphic, asking readers to witness the most disturbing aspects of humanity. The promise all along seems to be that the reader is going to be better for witnessing all this horror and reflecting on their own place within it, similar to how Ennet House residents benefit from witnessing themselves and each other at their honest worst.

The revelation that The Entertainment paralyzes people not in amusement but in trauma and self-reflection turns the entire novel on its head. The reader has just struggled through most of an 1100-page book with so many nested footnotes that it is hard ever to say how close the end might be. The self-edification that motivates many readers to keep reading turns out to be a trap in and of itself. So, too, does the promise that the characters will have satisfying arcs. Many of them grow, but most of their arcs remain somewhat unresolved. The allegorical connection between The Entertainment and the novel itself forces the reader to confront the idea that watching all of the characters suffer (and in some ways suffering as a reader) has been the point all along. This suffering itself is entertaining. The real "infinite jest" is that there may not be any reward at the end of the book except a compulsive urge to go back to the beginning and try to understand all the pieces that didn't make sense the first time around.