Endnote 24 of Infinite Jest contains James Incandenza's filmography. A feature that looks supplementary therefore carries information about the film whose title the novel shares. David Foster Wallace makes following a note consequential, then requires a return to the passage that sent the reader away. This arrangement can renew an appetite for explanation: the next small number might conceal something essential. Yet the same movement interrupts absorption and makes reading cumbersome. The endnotes put those effects into tension. They invite repeated pursuit of more material without reproducing the effortless captivity of the novel's lethally compelling Entertainment, or turning a reader's curiosity into a clinical condition.
The review of Infinite Jest and its competing narratives praises the book’s ambition and notes that important stories develop in the notes. That distribution also makes deciding what counts as supplementary difficult.
01
An apparently secondary list changes the stakes
The filmography offers a concrete reason to leave the main text. Molly Schwartzburg's account for the Harry Ransom Center identifies endnote 24 as the location of James O. Incandenza's catalogue of films, including Infinite Jest. The apparatus consequently contains more than background decoration. A bibliographical-looking excursion can alter the meaning of the title on the book's cover.
That placement changes the expectation attached to later note markers. The number itself does not announce how much interpretive weight its destination will carry. After the filmography, dismissing another note as disposable requires a judgement made before reading it. The promise of possible importance becomes an incentive to check, even when the current narrative is already demanding attention.
The endnote thus creates two unfinished commitments at once: the sentence waiting for its continuation and the newly opened body of material that may explain something beyond that sentence, with no advance guarantee that the extra labour will settle the question that matters most.
02
Coming back from a note takes work
Wallace's notes can contain footnotes of their own, a feature Steven Moore records in his 1996 review in Review of Contemporary Fiction. The excursion can acquire an excursion. Such nesting complicates the simple picture of a reader receiving one additional unit of pleasure and moving on. There is also a place to remember and an interrupted context to reconstruct.
Returning to that context may produce satisfaction, irritation or renewed uncertainty. An explanation encountered at the back can change the emphasis of the earlier sentence; an extended digression can make that sentence temporarily unfamiliar. The bodily movement through the volume becomes a repeated small demand to decide how separate pieces fit. Mere accumulation will not perform that work.
Wallace's letter to his editor, quoted by D. T. Max in The New Yorker, connects the notes with information overload and physical movement between parts of the book. It supports a formal reading of interruption. It does not establish that every interruption represents craving, or that the reader's experience follows a single psychological pattern.
03
The Entertainment marks the analogy’s breaking point
The film called the Entertainment absorbs its viewers so completely that other interests fall away. The book that describes this danger repeatedly sends its own reader elsewhere within the volume. That contrast matters. Endnotes introduce effort and competing demands at precisely the point where the imagined film offers a disastrous concentration of desire on one object.
Moore's review places addiction and recovery together at the novel's thematic centre, identifying Hal Incandenza at the tennis academy and Don Gately at Ennet House as central figures. The structural comparison should retain that doubleness. Repetition can sustain a demand for another explanatory payoff, but returning deliberately to difficult material can also be an act of sustained attention.
Reading a long novel is not equivalent to substance dependence. No diagnosis follows from eagerness to consult its notes, and no treatment follows from enduring their inconvenience. The defensible analogy concerns a pattern the form makes available: renewed pursuit of a promised satisfaction. Its counter-pattern is equally material. A note can break a spell, expose effort and make continuation a choice.
04
The filmography offers knowledge without the film
Endnote 24 contains a further distinction that the addiction analogy can obscure. A filmography is an account of works, not an opportunity to view them. Its catalogue can expand knowledge about Incandenza while keeping the object of dangerous fascination at the distance of a record. Information about the Entertainment is not itself the Entertainment.
Schwartzburg traces the format of Incandenza's entries to Wallace's annotated copy of Pam Cook's The Cinema Book. That material borrowing makes the fictional catalogue resemble an instrument for organising actual cinema. Scholarly form grants access to particulars, yet the form also fixes a limit: a description of a film cannot supply the experience its description attributes to a spectator.
The reader can therefore become fascinated by a list about fatal fascination without occupying the spectator's position. Wallace leaves a gap between catalogue and screening. The note keeps that gap open even as it draws attention towards the missing experience. Turning back to the main narrative carries away information, and perhaps greater curiosity, while leaving the film unplayed.
Sources
- primaryInfinite JestDavid Foster Wallace, Little, Brown and Company, 1996; Hachette hardcover listing.
- referenceInfinite Possibilities: A first glimpse into David Foster Wallace’s libraryMolly Schwartzburg, Harry Ransom Center, 8 March 2010.
- criticismA review of Infinite JestSteven Moore, Review of Contemporary Fiction 16.1, Spring 1996, pp. 141–142; reproduced by eNotes.
- referenceThe UnfinishedD. T. Max, The New Yorker, 9 March 2009 issue; quotes Wallace’s letter on endnotes.
- referenceInfinite Jest: style and narrativeWikipedia; endnote count and Entertainment cross-check.
Questions about Infinite Jest
When was Infinite Jest published?
Little, Brown and Company published the novel in 1996. Hachette’s hardcover listing gives 1 February as the publication date.
Are the notes footnotes or endnotes?
The main numbered apparatus consists of endnotes collected at the back. Some endnotes contain their own footnotes, so both terms can describe parts of the book, but they are not interchangeable.
How many endnotes are there?
The novel has 388 numbered endnotes. Total page counts vary with edition and should not be treated as a fixed measure of their reading time.
Why do the years have product names?
Within the novel’s future setting, year names have been sold to corporate sponsors. Steven Moore’s contemporary review identifies the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment as the setting for most of the action.