Confused and totally lost

David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest has so far completely baffled me.  There are so many narrative layers that Wallace interweaves into his novel.  There is definitely complexity in the first one hundred ninety-eight pages.  Wallace’s narrative has thus far been confusing and hard for me to follow.  The footnotes are long in length and hard to comprehend.  As far as the characters, there are so many of them to keep track of at times I found myself re-reading certain segments to see which character is talking or being described. True there is an astonishing range of cultural references, but I find most of the content of what I read so far morbid. Wallace’s Infinite Jest is similar to Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Heidi Julavits’s novel, The Uses of Enchantment because of its many layers and there is so much dialogue to digest that it becomes tedious and overwhelming to read.  There is definitely no time period given through the first one hundred ninety-eight pages. I am not even sure there is a storyline that I can follow.  There are so many narration changes through these one hundred ninety eight pages.  There are parts that are not written in English with reference starting on page 128 and told by yrstrruly, and there are sections written in broken English and capitalized letters and this becomes confusing to follow.

 

Wallace’s constant use of initials is problematic because at times he does not explains the meaning or exact words for the initials.  For example, on page 9 of Wallace’s text, the initials “N. A. A. U. P. and O. N. A. N. C. A. A.” are just initials and there is no explanation for what the initials stand for or mean.  Then there are the long and problematic names and titles for each segment. Sometimes they do not make sense and even while reading the segment the language and dialect to me does not coordinate with the name or title of that particular segments.  Wallace’s narrative is confusing and long-winded so far.  The long descriptions about the tennis matches and Enfield Tennis Academy become exhausting and tedious to read.  Even the section about the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery is wordy because it describes every notch and cranny about all the floors.  For example, “Unit # 7 is on the west side of the street’s end, sunk in hill-shadow and teetering right on the edge of the eroding ravine that leads down to the Avenue.  #7 is in bad shape boarded up and unmaintained and deeply slumped at the red roof’s middle as if shrugging its shoulders at some pointless indignity”(Wallace 197).  The description of this unit and the other units are long-drawn out.

 

David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest writing sometimes is pretentious. The footnotes get to be a little much because you constantly have to turn to the back of the book and this makes the reader loss track of where they left off in Wallace’s narrative.  There are some many major and minor characters that they are hard to keep track of who is doing what and what is happening to them.  One of Wallace’s flaws is that his characters’ dialogue – particularly that of his youthful protagonist and tennis prodigy, Hal Incandenza does not sound genuine. It sounds like Wallace talking through 17-year-olds, not 17-year-olds who have been transcribed. What I observed thus far about David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is it a book about a tennis academy, addiction, entertainment cartridges, and the Incandenza family, and a  cast of assorted characters.  My only hope about Wallace’s text is that it will eventually have some kind of storyline to follow, but I cannot see that happening.  Therefore, I can only guess that Wallace’s Infinite Jest will probably be to complex and I will not understand it.

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