Infinite Jest is the end of postmodernism. It is the final work in a trilogy of works that encapsulate the rapid changes that confronted literature in the 20th century, the first two being Joyce's Ulysses and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. As a modernist work (and in contention only with Eliot's Waste Land for the title of "the" modernist work), Ulysses builds upon realist attempts to derive truth or meaning out of the mundane or everyday lived experience of average people by implementing abstract literary techniques, most famously stream of consciousness, to better represent the "new" or "modern" way of living. However, Ulysses and many modernist works like it abstracted language to the point where meaning and truth often became obscured rather than illuminated; where ambiguity reigned, and entire passages turned into almost impenetrable networks of jargon and sentence fragments. These experimental forms of writing seemed to destroy past mathematical/logical/romantic forms of writing without supplanting new forms that could be relied upon to derive truth.
>>7882924
The experiments of the modernist movement thus led to the disillusionment and embitterment of the postmodernists. Left without a solid literary foundation to build upon and without even a sense of literary community, many postmodernists struggled with creating truth or meaning in their works and applied an apocalyptic veneer to their literature. Pynchon, who studied physics and engineering, used the thermodynamic law of entropy to express these frustrations. His works, Gravity's Rainbow most notably, depict the inevitable breakdown of complex or even simplistic systems. His stories begin with intricate plots comprised of hundreds of characters and end with disjointed, unclear, and unresolved conclusions. Questions are left unanswered, mired in the abstract literary techniques of the modernists. Characters merely disappear rather than reach, or fail to reach, their goals. Postmodernism in general wracks its brains for solutions to the existential quandary of whether truth can exist in a subjective world. Their works describe deconstruction without hope of a new foundation.
>>7882924
>>7882928
Wallace's Infinite Jest becomes the first major work to spurn this downward trajectory. Although cloaked in the abstract elements of his forebears, and constructing a complex, thousand-character plot in a Pynchonesque vein, Wallace manages to strike against these perennial literary pratfalls with moments of extreme lucidity and structural coherence. His story, itself involved with an inescapable echo chamber of meaningless entertainment, links the postmodern entropic catastrophe to consumerist culture: Upon watching "the perfect entertainment" that appears in the novel, characters lose all will to do anything else, even feed themselves; all constructive activities cease until their eventual death. The characters search for an antidote to this condition that is rumored to exist, much as the postmodernists searched (to no avail) for a solution to the death of truth and meaning in both literature and the world around them. However, unlike Gravity's Rainbow, the primary conflict and convoluted plot of Infinite Jest can and is resolved, with clear answers to many of the questions left open at the novel's ending provided through clues sprinkled throughout the novel itself. The point of the novel is not, as in postmodernism, that no point can be found, but rather that a point can be found if the reader exerts the effort to find it, to make the connections, to fill the blanks left unsaid. By no coincidence does much of the rest of the novel deal with the forging of community between those who otherwise would be left isolated and alone: the tennis school for brooding prodigies (emphasized with Hal Incandenza, who struggles to form meaningful relationships) and the Alcoholics Anonymous group for those who have destroyed their lives with drugs. While the overarching plot of the perfect entertainment unifies these elements, much of the story is about how the characters in these spheres manage to escape their own internal realms of meaning and truth and create communal meanings and truths. Rather than increased isolation, as in Pynchon, the novel ends with increased community. In doing so, it reverses the entropic trends expressed in Pynchon's works and the works of many other postmodernists. And its ultimate conclusion, when pieced together by the reader, suggests an end to the hyperconsumerist enslavement of humanity at the hands of entertainment. In doing so, Infinite Jest provides the first critical break with postmodernist themes and trains of thought and paves the way for a literature that can once again perceive meaning in the world.
Please, go wank your post-autism shit somewhere else.
Shut up.
>>7882924
>He actually takes this shit seriously
Haha oh wow
reading make me brain hurt :/
> Infinite Jest is the end of postmodernism.
what did he mean by this?
>>7883511
I chuckl'd
fucking nerd
The autism is real
I think the comparison between Infinite Jest and Ulysses is dubious at best, but the comparison between Infinite Jest and Gravity's Rainbow is just stupid and infuriates me.
You haven't read Gravity's Rainbow.
>>7884768
can confirm i have not read Gravity's Rainbow and it has a lot in common with Infinite Jest
If anything, Wallace's oeuvre shows exactly why postmodernism will never truly die. All attempts to replace or supplant it just prove its point and any attempts at rejecting it through regression to modernist or classical forms just come off as artificial and bland. Until society drastically changes, postmodernism is the final form of literature.
Yeah ij and gr are pretty similar, in that wallace clearly learned to write by reading pynchon. Stuff i thought was wallacean turned out to be pynchonian when i started to read pynchon. You could take tons of lines out of ij and you would swear it was pynchon.
This should become a copypasta if it isn't already.
>he thinks postmodernism "ends"
>>7886524
Pinecone is among his biggest influences, yes, but he did develop distinct aspects of his own style. It's just that most of the things he didn't crib from others weren't all that great.
>>7882924
you're taking this shit way too seriously
http://awwdip.tumblr.com/post/2502636032/why-you-shouldnt-read-infinite-jest
look at this person get triggered by your book /lit/
>>7887803
>tumblr.com
Thanks, but no thanks buddy boy.
I appreciate the effort OP but you end up like the average literary critic who comes up with a lot of shit about a novel that's not really relevant to anything in the big picture. I'm sure you have potential for making it in academic literary criticism though
>>7887837
>I'm sure you have potential for making it in academic literary criticism though
If I were OP I'd be cry at hearing that because literary critics are the biggest pseud pleb hacks alive.
