Infinite Jest: Irony 12 key examples

According to Marathe, humans' attachments become their "temple of worship." Americans are known for their patriotism, but this patriotism often manifests as fanatical support for American leaders. Johnny Gentle has risen to the office of president through the cult of celebrity worship. He and his administration, however, are just people. People "change, leave, die, become ill" all the time, betraying or otherwise ending relationships. As Steeply has just acknowledged, one of the current leaders (Rodney Tine) is having an affair with a Québecois woman (Luria) who might be betraying state secrets. Marathe argues that Tine could easily be more attached to Luria than he is to American citizens. Americans should be careful about turning Tine, Gentle, and the rest into their "temple of worship" instead of remaining loyal to their nation or another more stable cause.

Steeply does not argue with Marathe's logic, but his inquiry about Marathe's family is its own kind of comeback. Steeply is essentially saying that this point is rich coming from a man who is willing to betray just about anyone to help his wife get the medical care she needs. Marathe is ostensibly a Québecois operative, but he is a triple or quadruple agent. He always makes the choice that benefits his wife, not his nation. It is clear even to Steeply that Marathe's own "temple of worship" is already sick and dying.

Through subsequent phone calls, it becomes clear that Orin is asking Hal about Canadian Separatism because he himself is being questioned about it by Steeply (the latest "Subject" he is sleeping with). Orin has never been a very good student, and Hal knows that ordinarily he couldn't care less about Canadian politics. Fairly quickly, it is obvious that he just wants to impress Steeply. At this moment in the novel, the question foreshadows Orin's involvement with the political events that are beginning to unfold in the background, but it also suggests that he can't be the mastermind behind any schemes.

Unfortunately for Orin, he has gotten himself unwittingly involved in a Canadian Separatist terror plot by sending a copy of The Entertainment to the near-eastern medical attaché. The novel implies that he sends the film because the medical attaché once had an affair with Avril. If true, this motive highlights the fact that all Orin cares about is his own family—in fact, he is so wrapped up in his feelings about his family that he is jealous of his mother's sexual partners, struggles to connect with his own, and spends years going to great lengths to avoid talking to any of his surviving family members. Despite his self-involved motives, the medical attaché's mysterious death immediately draws powerful people's attention to The Entertainment and everyone in its orbit. Canadian Separatists want to use it to kill Americans en masse, and the O.N.A.N. Office of Unspecified Services wants to find it so they can foil the plot. Steeply goes undercover to investigate Orin on behalf of O.U.S., believing that he might know something. Orin, witless, begins learning all he can about Separatism and his own father's possible connections to it so that he can keep up with Steeply's questions. Their combined blind spots make for a situation that keeps escalating until Orin truly is in the thick of the political mess.

DMZ is fictional, but Wallace imagines that it is discovered in the same countercultural drug wave as LSD. In fact, it is discovered by the very same chemist who accidentally discovered LSD. After this discovery, LSD went on to become the drug of choice for many writers and artists who rebelled against mainstream institutions in the 1960s and 1970s. Timothy Leary was a psychologist and author who believed in the therapeutic effects of psychedelic drugs like LSD and mushrooms. He led social experiments that resulted in his firing from Harvard and became one of the intellectual faces of the counterculture movement. Alan Watts ran in these same circles.

Many drugs are associated, fairly or not, with particular social groups. By linking DMZ with the elite figures of the counterculture movement, Wallace turns it into a drug for well-off intellectuals who are curious about the human condition and the possibility that people might use drugs to free their minds from the strictures of society. Additionally, the idea that DMZ is "an obscure mold that grows only on other molds" suggests that it might be the substance Orin remembers Hal ingesting long ago at the Weston house. If this is true, it raises the question of how the mold got into the house. It is difficult to find DMZ, so it seems unlikely that it grew there of its own accord. More likely is the possibility that Hal's father, an accomplished scientist and artsy type with his own interest in social and psychological experimentation, grew the mold himself.

The novel never answers the question of exactly what causes Hal's breakdown by the time of his college interview, but it is heavily implied that DMZ has something to do with it. Some readers believe that Hal has a latent reaction to the DMZ he ingested as a young child. Others believe that James Incandenza's wraith deposits the drug on his toothbrush. On the other hand, maybe DMZ has nothing to do with Hal's condition, and he finally just collapsed under the pressure of stress and trauma. In any case, this passage about DMZ's origin suggests that the reader doesn't need to know what technically happened to Hal. Regardless, his father is at the root of it all.

"We've Only Just Begun" was a 1970 hit song by Carpenters, a brother-sister musical duo Karen and Richard Carpenter. Karen Carpenter wanted to be a drummer, but audiences fell in love with her distinctive alto singing voice. In the '70s, it looked like she had a long and promising musical career ahead of her. Privately, she was struggling with the pressures of fame, her family's expectations, and her own increasingly difficult body image issues. She developed a severe eating disorder that ultimately killed her before her 33rd birthday. Her death was the first time much of the general public learned about anorexia. Her dramatic weight loss had made it clear to many that something was wrong, but people did not have the vocabulary or understanding to help her.

The optimistic "We've Only Just Begun" and the Carpenters' other music is sometimes cited as an example of unfashionable adult contemporary music. Joelle hears the song and thinks that Karen Carpenter is "a ghastly old pre-Carter thing." Her aversion might be related to her musical taste, but it also might have something to do with the similarities between Joelle and Karen. Both of them have successfully performed a version of femininity that people love to watch, Karen onstage and Joelle on the football field or on film. Even after Joelle started wearing the veil, she developed a radio personality that people listen to religiously. Behind all her performative personas (and perhaps because of them), Joelle is struggling with addiction, trauma, and identity issues. Like Karen Carpenter at the height of her fame, Joelle's internal struggles are killing her. Ironically, though, her outward personas make it hard for anyone to see or believe that she, the "Prettiest Girl of All Time," needs help.

Gately moved to Ennet House to avoid prison time after he accidentally killed a Canadian operative during a burglary-gone-wrong. In a nice turn of events, he finds that sobriety suits him. He takes the AA program seriously (maybe even a little too seriously), and he is proud that he can help other residents of Ennet House on their own sobriety journeys. Not all of the residents want to engage with him in earnest. Gately accepts them on their own terms, but he is thrilled when Erdedy comes along and seems to really care what he has to say. In this passage, the narrator notes that Erdedy, who went to Harvard, is really nodding along because of his training in the elite "white-collar" world Gately has only encountered via the people he has robbed. Erdedy may not be following along with what Gately says so much as keeping up the appearance that he is invested so that he can get in and out of Ennet House efficiently.

The dramatic irony makes Gately look a little foolish, but more than anything it sheds light on the optimistic social experiment taking place at Ennet House and other rehabilitation programs. Boston is a city with pronounced social stratification, especially between rich and poor communities. While different substances may show up in different ways among various social groups, one of the novel's central claims is that addiction does not discriminate. Recovery programs, therefore, are one of the only spaces where people from every part of the class spectrum come together. Gately may not know how Erdedy interfaces with other white-collar people, but AA gives them a language and shared experience all their own. The novel is somewhat critical of AA, raising the question of whether it really makes recovering addicts free or whether it pens them in all over again with its rules and dogma. Still, it seems to be a place where people can explore human connection across social barriers that have previously restricted them.

Stice has come into Dr. Rusk's office because he has been seeing inanimate objects move around him, seemingly of their own accord. Rusk explains that the intense pressure of elite athletics must be making Stice anxious to control the objects around him. Ignoring Stice's protestations that he does not care about action figures, Rusk goes on at length about how children become obsessed with G.I. Joe and Barbie because they see the toys as symbols of their parents. She makes far-fetched connections between the acronym "G.I." and boy children's desire to impress their mothers by controlling their bowel movements. She then explains that boys might become obsessed with Barbies because of a repressed sexual attraction to their mothers.

Most of what Rusk says here falls in line with Freudian psychoanalysis (which has been heavily reworked or outright abandoned by modern psychologists). What makes her speech a parody is her almost free-association between G.I. Joe and gastrointestinal issues, along with her over-the-top insistence that the Oedipus complex must explain Stice's issues. She believes so deeply in sex, incest, and bathroom habits as driving forces of psychology that she doesn't notice that Stice isn't following her at all—nor is she following him. He can't keep up with her jargon, mistakenly assuming at first that "counterphobia" is fear of linoleum. Meanwhile, Rusk mistakenly assumes that Stice is complaining about a paranoid obsession with the objects in his room. On the contrary, he is disturbed that he is actually seeing the objects move. The implication in the book is that the wraith of Hal's father is haunting Stice, which is an entirely different issue from the one Rusk is trying to address. Stice doesn't even know what is real and what is in his head, and Rusk jumps to conclusions before Stice can fully describe his problem.

With this scene, Wallace shows that Freudian psychoanalysis (and sometimes talk therapy more generally) can be an inflexible script that gets in the way of real, helpful connection between a therapist and a patient: simply putting a person in a room with a therapist can make them feel even more alienated from the rest of the world. Many more modalities of talk therapy have become widely available since the time when Wallace wrote Infinite Jest. However, getting the right kind of help can still be a challenging process even for those with no barriers to access. Rusk's reaction to Stice's wraith problem is a comical and exaggerated way for Wallace to criticize the mental healthcare system for failing to listen to patients or consider when it may be the real world, and not the patient's mind, that is broken.

The real state bird of Massachusetts is the black-capped chickadee, but Lenz probably doesn't know or care. He jokes that the police siren is the state bird as a way of commenting on how common it is to hear police sirens while he is simply walking around town. His next comment, "To Project and to Swerve" plays on the police's stated mission, "to protect and to serve." Lenz doesn't put much stock in this mission statement. In his view, the police are rule-breakers who "project" their sirens to announce that they are "swerving" through traffic, exploiting their privileged exemption from the law so that they don't have to deal with gridlock.

Lenz's ironic comment and all the other imagery in this passage also suggest that he thinks of his late-night outings as urban nature-walks of a sort. Instead of birds, he listens to sirens, screams, and the "clanks and tinkles of dumpster-divers and can-miners." There is more to the city than all these signs of pain that Lenz points out to Green, but he seems to feel stifled by the city even as he tries to get out into it every night. It is important to remember that Lenz has his own history of encounters with the police, and they have ultimately landed him in Ennet House for what seems to be court-mandated sobriety. Lenz responds to the feeling that the police and Ennet House are trying to control him by sneaking small doses of cocaine and walking around at night, seeking animals to harm. He is an example of how institutional control can perpetuate cycles of violence and harm.

Mario, who takes comfort in Madame Psychosis's nightly radio show, has been struggling with loneliness ever since she went off the air. He is surrounded by plenty of people whom he talks to and even counsels on a regular basis. Madame Psychosis, though, talks about being alone in her own mind and body in a way that resonates with Mario. In response to her voice, Mario feels a kind of solidarity he is lacking in his in-person community. When he hears her through the window at Ennet House, he feels "strangely thrilled" not only to hear her voice, but also to know that there is another fellow listener so near to him. With this listener, too, he feels a kind of solidarity.

The reader knows what Mario does not: the listener is almost certainly Madame Psychosis herself, Joelle Van Dyne. She has recently checked into Ennet House, and her stay there is in fact the reason she is not making any new shows for the time being. Mario doesn't realize that in this moment when Madame Psychosis feels so far away, she is actually closer to him than she has been since she created her radio personality. By bringing Joelle back within Mario's physical orbit, Wallace also emphasizes the dramatic irony swirling around Mario's entire love of the radio show: he does not seem to realize that the reason Madame Psychosis's voice feels so familiar and nice to him is because he knows her personally.

This moment in the book almost seems to promise that Mario and Joelle will have a meaningful reunion. Ironically, their physical proximity doesn't amount to anything (at least that the book explicitly covers). This missed connection reinforces the fact that E.T.A. and Ennet House are worlds largely apart from each other, even though they stand right next to each other and their residents sometimes interact.

DeLint claims that the academy has "carved out" a place where talented students can work on their tennis skills without the crushing attention of the media. In other words, the academy protects the students. Steeply, suspicious that the academy is hiding The Entertainment (and thus poses a national security threat), plays on deLint's phrasing to wonder what the academy is "carved out of." Instead of negative space "carved out" of society, Steeply imagines that the academy is some sort of monument "carved out" of a suspicious material. Perhaps it is carved out of duplicity or pro-Québecois sentiment. After all, Avril Incandenza only became naturalized to the United States through marriage.

While Steeply is worrying about E.T.A.'s threat to national security, this passage invites the reader to worry about its threat to its own students. Steeply looks around and sees evidence of all the teens deLint claims to be protecting. Mixed in with their tennis equipment in the stands are "a couple incongruous cans of furniture polish." Students at E.T.A. habitually spray themselves down with lemon Pledge because, absurdly, they have found that it is the most effective sunscreen. Steeply's suspicion over what the academy is "carved out of" brings new and deeper meaning to the students' use of furniture polish on their own bodies. Under pressure from E.T.A. to practice tennis in the sun far longer than the human body can naturally accommodate, the students are spraying themselves down until they turn, metaphorically, into polished furniture that E.T.A. can show off to visitors like Steeply. It is ironic that E.T.A. claims to protect its students from the harsh pressures of the media when, inside the academy, E.T.A. is carving beautiful set pieces out of human children.

The kind of depression Hal experiences is anhedonia, or the absence of feeling. While miserable, Kate feels as though anhedonia would be preferable to the form of depression she experiences. It is called slightly different things by various practitioners, including both clinical depression and psychotic depression. Kate experiences it as an "invisible agony" so palpable and terrifying that she can imagine dying to escape it. She compares suicide to the choice a person might face if they were trapped on an upper floor of a skyscraper that was on fire. This person might choose to jump out the window to their near-certain death simply because the alternative is being burned alive. The profound instinct for self-preservation is, in a horrible twist of irony, what leads them to jump.

Kate resents the term "psychotic depression" because she doesn't think there is anything psychotic or unreasonable about her suicidal ideation. It is not that she wants to die, but rather that her self-preservation instincts are at war. Caught between death or a life of endless depressive torment that she does not know how to bear, she can imagine opting for death and does not want to be told she is out of her mind for entertaining the possibility. Ironically, she sees suicidal ideation as a resourceful form of self-preservation.

Kate is one of many characters in the novel who face the challenge of learning to dial down the pain they experience as a side effect of mere existence. Many characters, including Hal and Kate, use substances to turn their pain into something more like anhedonia. Those characters who go through addiction and recovery learn that this solution only makes things more difficult in the long run. Gately is perhaps the main character who comes closest to healthy coping, but the end of the novel suggests that even he relapses into drug use. Relapse is a common part of addiction recovery. Nonetheless, this is a pessimistic note on which to end the whole book. Wallace, who died by suicide 12 years after publishing Infinite Jest, seems to be working through the difficulty of bearing psychic pain for an entire lifetime. He seems to hope but never fully believe that the flames of depression can be contained indefinitely. The book should not be considered an endorsement of suicide, but it does insist on compassion for those who grapple with the all-consuming pain and terror of clinical depression.

Mario tries to interrupt Hal, telling him that he is not angry Hal lied and asking Hal what he wants to do about his situation. Hal hardly seems to notice that Mario has said anything. He instead continues to spin an abstract metaphor about his mental state. He seems to imagine that he is orbiting around a black hole that is growing ever larger and threatening to swallow him up. Soon, he won't be able to resist its pull. Like a star that passes too close to a black hole, he will be shredded into pieces in front of everyone who has come to watch him at the peak of his tennis game. Even if he manages to pass the drug test at the end of the month, Hal is sure that everyone in his life will see what a fraud he is. In particular, he is sure that everyone will see how similar he is to his father.

Hal rightfully resents his father for the way he parented and for the way he died. When he was alive, he tried progressively more complicated ways to "connect" with Hal—disguises, experimental films, and more. He never bothered to drop all the pretense and meet Hal where he was at. When he died, he left Hal to discover the aftermath and develop a pathological guilt over the possibility that he was responsible for his father's death. Hal is desperate not to become someone who, like his father, alienates people and sinks into a self-centered depression. Ironically though, this desperation has led him to do exactly that. The trauma surrounding James Incandenza's life and death is a black hole that is threatening to destroy Hal once and for all. Its pull is so strong that Hal can't even hear Mario trying to assuage his fear and help him find a way forward.

If Joelle is being entirely earnest, The Entertainment was intended not for Hal (as James Incandenza's wraith attests) but rather for Joelle. She used to joke that she hid her face because, like Medusa in one of James's other films, she was so beautiful she would paralyze anyone who looked directly at her. In turn, James created a film so mesmerizing that it needs to stay hidden forever. She now tells Steeply that the joke is even better than James knew because Steeply will need to go into the giant dump of the Great Concavity if he wants to find the Master cartridge. James has made such a dangerously enticing film that an American operative will cross enemy lines and wade into the garbage in order to find it.

Joelle may be telling Steeply all she knows, in which case either she or others (or, likely, all of them) are missing key pieces of the story. James may have made The Entertainment with multiple goals, including connecting with Hal and also joking with Joelle. He may even have made it intending to weaponize it, as Steeply worries. The reader knows that The Entertainment is not buried with James because Orin has been making copies of it, but then again Hal, Wayne, and Gately dig something out of James's grave. The confusion and contradiction that comes to the surface in this scene demonstrates that no one ever has the full story, including the reader; everyone is always too wrapped up in their own version of events to see the whole picture.

On the other hand, Joelle might be telling a deliberate lie to get Steeply away from her. She remarks that her story will send him into the "annulation zone" (referring to the Great Concavity). James Incandenza first understands the idea of annulation when he sees a detached doorknob rolling around on the floor, going in circles around a fixed point. Joelle might in fact be sending Steeply into the Great Concavity on a wild goose chase that takes the trajectory of a rolling doorknob: while he is running in circles around the Master cartridge he is sure is located there, she can get back to living her life.