Breaking the Pattern: Session Fourteen of the Second Steemit Book Club, Plus Details for Session Fifteen

Infinite Jest is not like your typical book. From the very first pages you realize that it combines long and monotonous sections with frenetic parts where unbelievable events occur out of the blue taking the reader with them in some sort of a wild roller-coaster ride.

And then back to long monotonous sections that takes you back to another world entirely.

A case could be made that the reason why David Foster Wallace does that is for the reader to drop their guard and then when they’d expect it the least he pulls the rug and drops them, leaving everyone in a state of awe.

This is not completely unheard of in the world of storytelling. Many writers and screenwriters prepare the scene in advance, let me give you an example.

Sometimes you’re watching a TV show and you realize that some secondary character is getting an unusual amount of screentime, and then out of the sudden, boom! They meet a surprise demise just when you’ve started to develop some empathy and attachment to them.

You see, these things are not a coincidence but the story was told purposely in that manner to generate an emotional response in the viewer.

DFW being such a skilled storyteller uses those tools in his advantage as well. he always seems to gather some emotional response from the reader although it’s true that he does that sometimes in the most unusual ways.

In Infinite Jest he often foreshadows the events that are about to unfold, and because of that we start to recognize a pattern and more or less guess what’s the next revelation could be all about.

However, this is much easier said than done in this novel.

In the last chapter for example, we have seen a lot of emphasis on Jolene Van Dyne’s childhood trauma, and then in the middle of that, we’ve been presented with some new stories of how survivors of trauma disfigure themselves while thinking that those things are probably unrelated.

After that comes the biggest revelation of the chapter is that Miss Psychosis (Jolene’s alter ego) always wears a mask to hide her face.

At this stage it’s safe to assume that Jolene is disfigured as well given the amount of attention that was given to those two subjects, and more importantly it fits the patterns of the novel so far.

But here’s where it gets interesting, in this week’s chapter we discover that the patterns can be broken as we discover that the reason she hides her face is not because she is disfigured but because she is actually extremely beautiful.

From what it seems, David Foster Wallace was probably counting on the readers following the patterns, and using their expectation to his advantage, he breaks those patterns and leaving us to the mercy of the story until the very end thus keeping the story completely unpredictable.

Without further ado, here’s the recording to the entire session Last week’s meeting:

https://soundcloud.com/user-655948001/infinite-jest-session-14-of-the-steemit-book-club

Details for the next meeting:

Book: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Reading Assignment: Chapter Fourteen “YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDER-GARMENT” (pages 528-553)
Date: Monday, June 26th
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

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