Anti-Interiority

n david foster wallace’s 1996 behemoth Infinite Jest, everyone is an addict. More precisely, everyone is a compulsive user: of crack, Demerol, booze, elite competitive tennis, M*A*S*H, household bleach. Recovering drug addict Don Gately emerges as one of the sprawling novel’s heroes, in part because of his success in recovery. Readers want to let Wallace off the hook for the cliched contradictions of workingclass identity defining Gately—his sweet naivete and brute, bearlike strength, his wide-ranging, deep insight and lack of formal education, his ability to get the uptown girl despite his downtown background— because he’s so dang likeable. Gately’s struggle to “work the program,” to apply the rules of Alcoholics Anonymous to his own life meaningfully and effectively, drive much of the novel’s emotional power. And despite the problems one may have with AA as a vehicle for healthy living, Gately’s mode of fighting addiction is the only one in the novel that actually works. In Wallace’s obsessive-compulsive, entertainmentaddled, apocalyptically consumption-based society, everyone would do well to act like Don Gately. In one example of Gately’s recovery process, he follows AA’s dictum to pray to a “higher power,” even though he has no idea who, what, where, why, or how such a power might exist. Gately “simultaneously confesses and complains” to an AA meeting that he takes one of AA’s very rare specific suggestions and hits the knees in the A.M. and asks for Help and then hits the knees again at bedtime and says Thank You, whether he believes he’s talking to Anything/-body or not, and he somehow gets through the day clean. This, after ten months of ear-smoking concentration and reflection, is still all he feels like he “understands” about the “God angle.” . . . He feels about the ritualistic daily Please and Thank You prayers rather like a hitter that’s on a hitting streak and doesn’t change his jock or socks or pregame routine for as long as he’s on the streak. W/sobriety being the hitting streak and whatnot, he explains

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Identity (music) · Objectification · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Theology · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Philosophy · Psychology · Religious studies

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