On this storyline, Wallace screws up much other contemporary fiction and anti-utopian schemes. Throughout the novel, two heroes seem to balance the author’s intention: one gradually loses clarity, the second seeks a way to find it.

While Hal slowly slips into drug addiction and further into insanity, Don, on the contrary, desperately fights with his demons – goes to meetings of anonymous alcoholics and tries to clear blood and mind from stimulant drugs. The text is quite symmetrical from the architectural perspective. All the events are deployed in two locations – the Enfield Tennis Academy and the rehabilitation clinic Annette House. The action, for the most part, is closed on two characters – Harold “Hal” Incandenza, a young man with outstanding linguistic abilities and a budding tennis player, and Donald “Don” Gately, who is a dimedrol addict. However, a clear system is visible in such a complex structure. At the same time, this approach gives the title and the whole text an additional post-rhythmic dimension, because the “Infinite Jest” is a book about the destructive force that our craving for pleasure has. Stretching the introduction, making it unbearable, and the author seems to be trying to weed out the superfluous.

The whole first part of the novel is a kind of filter. Wallace, who himself taught literacy skills all his life, does exactly the opposite: he writes a text in which the first two or three hundred pages all heroes should be marked with bookmarks, so as not to lose them in the darkness of the imagination. All the literary courses of future prose writers teach how important it is to start and grab the attention of the reader. The first 200 pages are, at first glance, chaotically mounted cutting scenes, descriptions, and dialogues, which are difficult to compile into a single picture. His novel “Infinite Jest” is his most famous work.

His name is associated with tennis, a unique worldview and the ability to notice the smallest details and depict them in his fiction essays. It is difficult to say whether his emotional disorder or just a great talent was the reason of his uniqueness. David Foster Wallace is an unusual writer.

The infinite jest