The David Foster Wallace Philosophy On Paragraphs: The Longer The Better

Pages Read: 166

Pages To Go: 812

Footnotes: 55 of 388

Since progress has been slow, it’s quite possibly I’ve already written something along these lines, but the secret to writing a novel is that it’s really just a series of short stories, it just happens that the stories are serialized. Any chapter or episode needs to stand alone. Not in the sense that you shouldn’t need to read what came before, but in the sense that there is a conflict presented at the beginning that gets resolved or at least is closer to being resolved by the end.

I think about this a lot reading Infinite Jest. Because it really is a series of short stories, except so far they only tangentially appear to be related to each other.

In the latest episode, the father of James Incandenza (Hal, Mario, and Orin’s grandfather) is giving a long-winded monologue that is ostensibly directed towards James, who’s ten years old at this stage, which starts out as a lecture on how to properly open up a garage door and goes on to include many topics, including his future as a tennis prodigy and a particularly gruesome knee injury.

The only thing that could make this a more DFWian chapter is if it included a long footnote on the chemical composition of Dexedrene.

Vocab Word: Veldt open, uncultivated country or grassland in southern Africa.

You are reading my live blog of Infinite Jest. Start at the beginning.