Battle Royale: Session Nine of the Second Steemit Book Club, Plus Details for Session Ten

While we usually start these summaries with the beginning of the chapter, an exception must be made this time as read through an epic battle of some strange yet intriguing game that takes place at final pages of this week’s chapter.

The game in question - quite possibly a fictional one born out of the creative genius of DFW - is a game that can only be described as a hybrid of Tennis, Paintball and the infamous board-game Risk.

At first the game starts in a lively and amusing manner with a bunch of teenagers having fun with each other, but as the game starts escalating and countries start being taken off the board… Then it’s only a matter of time until violence drowns the smiles as blood spills across the field.

The sad part is that everyone seems to forget that the game is in fact, fictional.

The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse

A few chapters ago, we witnessed an epic conversation between a Quebecois nationalist slash ”Wheelchair Assassin” named Marathe and an American undercover FBI agent named Hugh (Or Helen) Steeply.

The theme of that conversation was mainly about freedom, that and the importance of choosing one’s temple.

Chapter nine opens with another highly interesting humor-packed conversation between Steeply who believes in people’s right to choose, and Marathe who on the other hand believes that individual freedoms will always be a nation’s downfall.

As you can see, both opinions could not be further away from each other.

On one side we have Steeply criticizing Marathe’s hopes for an authoritarian “strong” state and paints it as nothing short of a totalitarian dystopia.

And on the other side we have Marathe criticizing the ridiculous degree upon the which the need for entertainment has gained importance in the United States which is presented in a very caricaturistic way in the novel.

Marathe seems to think that freedom was the cause, and that Americans must be to blame with everything that is wrong in his country.

From that point, things start to quickly escalate until the point where he starts advocating to get rid of all Americans as the ultimate solution, and in the process claiming that: “You cannot kill what’s already dead”.

Us Vs Them, A.K.A The Song Remains the Same

At this point, it has become clears that Marathe seems like he could only see “the others” as less than humans now, to which Steeply brilliantly replied:

“Your Sans-Christe Gente was in this one part correct: "Someone is to blame".

...There is the villain he saw you needed, all of you, to delay this splitting apart. There is the villain he saw you needed, all of you, to delay this splitting apart. To keep you together, the hating some other. Gentle is crazy in his head, but in this "fault of someone" he was correct in saying it. Un ennemi commun.

But not someone outside you, this enemy.”

The Dehumanisation of Man

“It neither kills outright nor inflicts apparent physical harm, yet the extent of its destructive toll is already greater than that of any war, plague, famine, or natural calamity on record - and its potential damage to the quality of human life and the fabric of civilized society is beyond calculation.

For that reason this sickness of the soul might well be called the 'Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.' Its more conventional name, of course, is dehumanization.” ― Ashley Montagu, The Dehumanization Of Man.

But before that, here’s the recording to the entire session Last week’s meeting:

https://soundcloud.com/user-655948001/infinite-jest-session-9-of-the-steemit-book-club

Details for the next meeting:

Book: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Reading Assignment: Chapter Ten “YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDER-GARMENT” (pages 343-379)
Date: Monday, May 15th
Start Time: 6:00 p.m. PST / 9 p.m. EST / 2 a.m. GMT
Call Length: One hour.
Phone Access: (800) 719-6100 or (218) 339-7800, access code 629-1831#
Web Audio Access (sound quality isn't generally as good as phone): https://hello.freeconference.com/conf/call/6291831

P.S. You can these links to help guide you as you read Infinite Jest:
http://faculty.sunydutchess.edu/oneill/Infinite.htm (THIS LINK HAS SPOILERS)

http://infinitejest.wallacewiki.com/david-foster-wallace/index.php?title=Main_Page#Page_by_Page_Annotations (No spoilers)

Best,

@neilstrauss, @the-alien and the #steemit-book-club