Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (Book Analysis) E-Book

Bright Summaries

• Herausgeber: BrightSummaries.com
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: BrightSummaries.com
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 24

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Unlock the more straightforward side of Infinite Jest with this concise and insightful summary and analysis!

This engaging summary presents an analysis of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, a vast, sweeping novel which takes in a tennis academy for gifted young players, a halfway house for recovering addicts and an “entertainment” rumoured to be so compelling that it will kill whoever watches it. The novel’s scope, humour and complexity mean that it is widely recognised as the author’s masterpiece and as one of the greatest novels of recent years. David Foster Wallace was an American writer, and is one of the most influential authors of recent years. Besides Infinite Jest, he is also known for the short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and the essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster.

Find out everything you need to know about Infinite Jest in a fraction of the time!

This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you:
• A complete plot summary
• Character studies
• Key themes and symbols
• Questions for further reflection

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Leseprobe

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

AMERICAN WRITER

Born in Ithaca, New York (USA) in 1962.Died in Claremont, California (USA) in 2008.Notable works:Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), short story collectionConsider the Lobster (2005), essay collectionThe Pale King (2011), unfinished novel

David Foster Wallace was a complex writer in terms of both his story-telling and the subjects and themes he explored. His work has influenced numerous contemporary writers and he is highly regarded for his work across the novel, short story and essay mediums. His work deals with diverse themes, including depression and mental illness, addiction, sport, entertainment and politics. His idiosyncratic writing style and expansive vocabulary make his fiction among the most instantly recognisable in modern literature. Educated to a high level, Wallace published his first novel while still at college.

His works are often intimidating in their length and the detail Wallace gives the reader, but they are as funny as they are insightful. Indeed, one of the key characteristics of Wallace’s writing was its ability to find humour in very dark situations. He was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (commonly known as the MacArthur Genius Grant) and was a regionally recognised junior tennis player. This diverse biography reveals the wide sources from which Wallace found inspiration for his fiction. After suffering for most of his adult life with mental health problems, Wallace killed himself in 2008. He left the unfished manuscript for The Pale King, which was published posthumously to much acclaim. The End of the Tour (2015), a film starring Jason Segel as Wallace, was made based on David Lipsky’s book detailing their time spent together on Wallace’s Infinite Jest book tour.

INFINITE JEST

A NOVEL OF IDEAS

Genre: novelReference edition: Wallace, D. (2012) Infinite Jest. London: Abacus.1stedition: 1996Themes: addiction, mental illness, creativity, talent, entertainment, drugs, politics

Infinite Jest is David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus. It runs to over a thousand pages in paperback edition and includes almost 400 endnotes which are integral to the narrative structure and are sometimes many pages long themselves. Wallace deals with the contemporary condition of living in North America, exploring its neuroses and hidden dangers, as well as hypothesising on the future of such a world. The novel is full of details which are not relevant outside of the text, details which pertain to the fictional world Wallace has made, and this, coupled with the time it takes for many to read the novel, creates a completely immersive world.