What Happens at the End of Infinite Jest? (or, the Infinite Jest ending explained)
Herb: Is there no “ending” to “Infinite Book” because there couldn’t be? Or did you just get tired of writing it?
DFW: There is an ending as far as I’m concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an “end” can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occurred to you, then the book’s failed for you.
(Live Online with David Foster Wallace, May 17, 1996)
WARNING: This whole thing is one gigantic spoiler. Only read it if you’ve already tried to figure it out for yourself first.
Gately, having relived his bottom, begins to recover from his infection.
But at the same time, Hal’s condition deepens. Ever since Hal ate the mold as a child, he’s been a brilliant communicator but unable to feel. (694: “Hal himself hasn’t had a bona fide intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion since he was tiny … in fact he’s far more robotic than John Wayne.”) JOI was the only one who could see it. They all thought he was crazy but as a wraith he can actually read Hal’s thoughts and he’s only confirmed in his view.
In life he created the Entertainment to draw Hal out (Hal moves outwardly but doesn’t feel inside; victims of the Entertainment feel—something—inside but don’t move outwardly), but in death he realizes this isn’t the solution — possibly because viewers of the Entertainment don’t ever communicate back. So JOI has to resort to desperate measures. After all, as he tells Gately, “No! No! Any conversation or interchange [between father and son] is better than none at all.” (839)
JOI’s wraith is responsible for the strange disturbances around ETA — tripods in the forest, moving Ortho’s bed, ceiling tiles on the floor. He knocks the ceiling tiles down in an attempt to find the DMZ, thinking this new mold-based compound will counteract the effects of the first. Pemulis is too distracted with getting expelled to have Hal take it, so JOI gets it to Hal some other way (through Ortho? it’s not clear).
By the morning of the 20th, it begins to take effect and Hal’s symptoms indeed begin to reverse: he is now unable to communicate feelings (people see him as either laughing hysterically or terribly sad) but beginning to actually feel (like Gately, he spends a lot of time lying on the floor thinking about the past — the hero of nonaction from his essay — 142). While before, everyone could hear him except Jim; now only Jim can hear him (since, as with Gately, he can hear Hal’s thoughts).
By the time of the match, his symptoms are so bad he’s taken by ambulance to the hospital (16: “the only other emergency room I have ever been in [was] almost exactly one year back”), safely escaping the A.F.R.’s assault. Like fellow student Otis P. Lord, he gets the bed next to Gately. Joelle (who is at the hospital for a meeting) visits Gately on her way out and recognizes Hal. She tells them both about the hunt for the lethal Entertainment and the resulting Continental Emergency and they all go to dig up JOI’s grave. They persuade John Wayne, a spy for the A.F.R., to become a double agent and help sneak them into Jim’s Quebc burial site. Wayne presumably tells the A.F.R. he is actually a triple agent — that he will steal the tape as soon as Hal digs it up. But, as with Marathe, his loyalties are ultimately even-numbered (n. 40). The A.F.R. finds out and brutally murders him, which is why he can’t win the WhataBurger (16f).
As Gately forsees:
he’s with a very sad kid and they’re in a graveyard digging some dead guy’s head up and it’s really important, like Continental-Emergency important, and Gately’s the best digger but he’s wicked hungry, like irresistibly hungry, and he’s eating with both hands out of huge economy-size bags of corporate snacks so he can’t really dig, while it gets later and later and the sad kid is trying to scream at Gately that the important thing was buried in the guy’s head and to divert the Continental Emergency to start digging the guy’s head up before it’s too late, but the kid moves his mouth but nothing comes out, and Joelle van D. appears … while the sad kid holds something terrible up by the hair and makes the face of somebody shouting in panic: Too Late. (934)
It’s too late because someone got there first and took the master. Whoever took it is presumably the person who’s made and mailed the extant copies. It couldn’t be the A.F.R. or O.U.S. or they wouldn’t still be searching for it. It probably wasn’t the F.L.Q. because the tapes in their displays were blank. It couldn’t be Avril acting alone; she has problems but she’s not that kind of cold-blooded killer. It had to have been Orin.1
Orin (who never attended his father’s funeral) went to the gravesite and dug up his father, releasing the wraith in the process. (244: “After a burial, rural Papineau-region Québecers purportedly drill a small hole down from ground level all the way down through the lid of the coffin, to let out the soul, if it wants out.”) Orin, who is such a partisan of his father that he feels the need to repeatedly ruin the lives of people like his mother, has been mailing the tapes to his father’s enemies in revenge: disapproving film critics in Berkeley and the medical attaché (whose affair with his mother drove Himself especially wild) in Boston. It’s possible he’s being influenced by the wraith in these actions.
After the A.F.R. releases roaches into his giant glass tumbler, Orin cuts a deal with the A.F.R. and gives them the tape in return for letting him live. (He’s apparently still alive on p. 14.) The A.F.R. uses the tape to set off some sort of intracontinental conflagaration (16: “some sort of ultra-mach fighter too high overhead to hear slices the sky from south to north”) which apparently topples the Gentle administration (n. 114: “[Y.G. is] the very last year of Subsidized Time”).
As seen in Chapter 1, Hal’s condition deepens until he literally can’t communicate at all, but no longer feels like a robot anymore. (12: “I’m not a machine. I feel and believe.”) The only thing he has left is tennis and he looks forward to playing Ortho Stice in the final match of the WhataBurger. But Stice is possessed by his father (in the manuscript, Stice is called “the Wraithster”), so the novel ends as Hal finally gets to really interface with his father — in the only way he has left.
-
Recall that “the padded mailer [received by the attaché] is postmarked suburban Phoenix area in Arizona U.S.A.” (36) Also, Orin mentions being “in line in the post office” even though, as Hal points out, “You hate snail-mail. And you quit mailing the Moms the pseudo-form-replies two years ago.” (244) Orin doesn’t reply to that.
And: “There was reason to think M. DuPlessis had received his original copies from this relative, an athlete [Orin]. … [He] may have borne responsibility for the razzles and dazzles of Berkeley and Boston, U.S.A.” (723) The other appearances of the Entertainment are New Iberia LA (Orin played football in New Orleans LA) and Tempe AZ (Orin lives in Phoenix AZ). (Thanks to Greg Carlisle, p. 477, for catching these.) ↩
September 16, 2009
Comments
Well said and eminently plausible. Someone else pointed out that Stice’s connection to objects moving strangely includes his match with Hal, but I’ve never considered that Ortho could be somehow a conduit or connection to Himself.
One small correction - Orin is not “drafted” by the NFL after YDAU. He has already been in the NFL for at least two seasons, in New Orleans and Phoenix. The mention of Orin on p.14 just confirms that he survives into the Year of Glad.
posted by jackd on September 17, 2009 #
Alas, Hal is in Arizona and Gately in Massachusetts at the time of their hospitalizations, so the meet-up around which this theory pivots doesn’t happen. It’s still plausible that Gately and Hal meet up after the Whataburger, of course, but you’ll need to shift your timeline a little.
posted by Daryl on September 17, 2009 #
Argh, I was off by a year with that last comment.
posted by Daryl on September 17, 2009 #
Daryl, what makes you think Hal’s first hospitalization was in AZ? He narrates: “At the only other emergency room I have ever been in, almost exactly one year back, the psychiatric stretcher was wheeled in and then parked beside the waiting-room chairs.”
Nothing about it being in AZ, and in fact he implies that it was not the same emergency room.
posted by crazymonk on September 17, 2009 #
Jinx.
posted by crazymonk on September 17, 2009 #
BTW, one thread that’s building near the end of the book that you don’t mention involves law enforcement. Namely, the ADA who has staked out Gately’s hospital room, and the “Middlesex County Sheriff’s car” seen in front of Ennet House in Joelle’s very last scene in the book. Perhaps this doesn’t interfere much with your projected ending, but I do wonder if Wallace had them in mind playing a larger role.
posted by crazymonk on September 17, 2009 #
So interesting and well thought out!!! One question, how did Orin know the Entertainment cartridge was buried with JOI? Thanks so much for sharing your thinking!!!
posted by Colette on September 17, 2009 #
I am into IJ as an oblique prophecy and thinking about Orin at the post office just seems reminiscent of the mailing of anthrax letters post 911.
posted by jef wallace on September 17, 2009 #
also, linking the IJ victims up to Himself’s enemies was genius. i had been thinking it was Avril !!!
posted by jef wallace on September 17, 2009 #
I’m interested in the evidence for the idea that John Wayne was murdered… why murdered as opposed to just defecting to Quebec?
Love this theory.
posted by mo pie on September 19, 2009 #
I also like the theory that Hal somehow synthesized DMZ within himself, since it’s a mold that grows on another mold: http://dfan.org/jest.txt
posted by Karen on September 22, 2009 #
Thank you.
posted by mike on September 23, 2009 #
Someone must have noted somewhere that Luria is more or less an anagram of Avril (u and v being one and the same in Latin).
posted by Zach Soldenstern on December 9, 2009 #
Yeah but Hal gets put in the room with Gately who then does what, rises from his deathbed with one arm and goes into the concavity kicking ass and taking names? Clearly Gately dies of an infection at the end so it could be his ghost who is accompanying Hal to dig up the master.
posted by mrchris on December 20, 2009 #
i have a few questions. hopefully this is still being viewed/updated.
does Gately die? Does he survive the infection or is it his ghost that helps dig up Himself with Hal? I feel that he ends up taking the meds and may or may not become addicted again “Gately’s the best digger but he’s wicked hungry, like irresistibly hungry” (934). Briefly after in the novel he talks about his addiction to the pain meds earlier in his life and talks about how hungry for sweets he and his fellow addicts are.
who’s the figure on 867 sitting in the bleachers getting buried by snow?
posted by todd on January 28, 2010 #
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