Infinite Jest: James Incandenza's Death?

I read Infinite Jest twice, ten years ago. I just recently picked it up and am studying it, and am noticing many things.

One of my biggest questions is how James Incandenza died. Or rather, who killed him. While there is some good reason to believe that he would have killed himself, (he was an alcoholic who was becoming more and more mentally ill), I am not quite sure that he wasn't murdered by Avril.

My main reason for suspecting that it could have been a murder doesn't really come from the text (although Joelle mentions that he left no note), but from the Hamlet-parallels. Hamlet's father, after all, was murdered and his death made to look like something else.

Of course, how much that is a plausible reason for suspicion depends on how much of Infinite Jest is meant to be directly parallel to Hamlet.

Thoughts?

Wow. It hadn't occured to me. But now, I would be surprised if you were wrong! Where are the experts?

Not an expert but maybe they'll arrive shortly ...

Very interesting, and makes some sense. I never quite got, no matter how well DFW explained it, how a person could solo'ly insert their head in a microwave oven, close the door, turn it on, etcetera. Didn't ring true to me. Of course, with some "help" ...

and, in fact, my recollection is that the improbability of this is mentioned a few times in the book

**Spoilers, etc, whatever**

I'm too exhausted to check the text right now, but my immediate reaction is that I don't buy it. For one thing, I think it would be a mistake to think of IJ as a "retelling" of Hamlet. There are some parallels, but they only extend as far as Wallace found them to be useful (ditto the Bros Incandenza as the Bros K; ditto Gately as Hercules). Before I pass out, maybe this will serve as a jumping off point for one of these "experts":

-The mechanics of the microwave suicide are actually explained in one passage, as I remember it. It had to do with a hole cut in from one side on the door for his neck to slip through from the side, and some kind of rubber encasing it to make it airtight, as I remember it. Anyway, the point is, Wallace tried to make it sound marginally plausible.

-The Wraith doesn't mention being murdered (as you'd expect it to if we were *really* gonna draw this comparison out to its natural conclusion). It doesn't even appear directly to Hal. It seems to be longing to communicate with Hal, but that's something Himself always wanted anyway.

-If you accept, as I do, that Orin is responsible for the copies of the Entertainment getting sent out to various people, you sort of need Himself to have committed suicide for that to fully make sense. He's punishing the people who drove him to kill himself (as Orin sees it). So he goes after the men Avril had affairs with (Attache, etc), he goes after the academics who mocked Himself's films, and he ultimately hopes to get Avril herself. If Avril killed Himself, perhaps along with CT's help (again, drawing out the comparison), that would seem to require a much more direct reprisal from Orin, rather than this roundabout campaign of targeting people who may have merely annoyed his father while he was alive. Whereas if Himself committed suicide, that could change the whole tenor of those interactions for someone who was already inclined to want to interpret them in the worst light. I hope I'm making myself clear.

So those are my stream-of-consciousness impressions. I'll take a closer look tomorrow I hope. Does any of this stuff make sense to anyone?

I don't necessarily think it is the case, but I think it is plausible.

Also, much of how plausible it is depends on how you view Avril. From reading on here, as well as rereading the book, Avril seems to come across as a more sinister figure than she appears at first. But much of that is speculative.

But, I will say that Avril (and CT) had motive, method and opportunity to kill JOI. It doesn't mean she did, but it seems plausible to me.

Another thing is, I always remember when reading Infinite Jest, or anything else as meticulously constructed, is that anything that occurs to me occurred to the author. If I can casually see the parallels between JOI and Hamlet's father, then it must have occurred to Wallace while writing it. Which isn't to say that it is true, but that Wallace must have known the idea would at least cross people's mind. It could be a red herring.

herrring? did someone say herring?

I'm overawed at the amount of detail you people can remember.

The last point is an excellent one, >6 glowing-fish:.

6: "when reading Infinite Jest, or anything else as meticulously constructed"

Do provide a reading list. In sheer scope and detail I thought IJ was unlike anything I've ever read. I was in a permanent state of awe while reading it, wondering how someone could provide this level of spurious and non-spurious detail, and make it sound so easy. And but so I still haven't figured it out.

Other things as meticulously constructed? Well, I wouldn't want to start any debates, or dilute the main purpose of this thread, but actually the two things that come to mind, as far as construction goes, would be Harry Potter and Babylon 5. Of course, a popular young adult series, and a cult science-fiction tv show aren't really to compare with a piece of literary fiction, but in both cases, the creators were tying pretty much every line, and every minor character, into a thematic arc.

In my book it is the spurious details that make all the difference, correctly applied.

8> and but so, you say? Love it! Anna, I'm still in a permanent state of awe. You said what I've always thought of the book.

9> I'm glad you brought up this topic; I agree completely that if we thought of it as readers, DFW inevitably did too, and like Joyce, I suspect, did also in Ulysses, before him.

Now, my jaw just went slack when you mentioned HP, but wtfdik? Never read HP myself.

And sutpen, you too are so an IJ expert! You and pyrocow man: LTs in house IJ academicians.

the creators were tying pretty much every line, and every minor character, into a thematic arc.

let's not be too overawed by this. this is how art has been made since the very beginning. Standard operational procedure for any work of art.

DFW's gift was that he made it looked like just the opposite, like the thing was just sprawling and messy.

I don't know if every book is as well constructed. To take a somewhat similar example, War & Peace is a sprawling novel that looks through all levels of society, but War & Peace isn't a "constructed" work, I don't feel.

It could also be that the works that I consider less "constructed" are just works that I am not as familiar with. Maybe even books that seem to be a collection of disjointed episodes (You Can't Go Home Again, would be another great example) are really all woven out of very fine fabric down to the sentence level.

aha!
War and Peace is just as well constructed as IJ. Like IJ it only appears to sprawl.

5: But wraiths are a classic result of a bad death, e.g. homicide but also suicide, I suppose. And a "marginal" explanation goes either way doesn't it? A half-baked (ding!) explanation sometimes tells you something right there. Finally, the people who drove him to suicide are even more deserving of a ghostly revenge if they outright killed him!

15:
Yeah, the people who killed him would be more deserving of punishment for sure. I was trying to get at that in my first rambling response to this thread, but that probably wasn't made clear: If, for instance, Avril and CT killed Himself, you'd expect Orin to go straight after them, and only them. They're the ones responsible for Himself's death. If, on the other hand, Himself killed...himself...then there are a whole host of people who could be accused of bearing some small portion of the blame. And the cast of characters who get sent copies of the Entertainment is a little too varied for me to believe that they all collaborated in a murder plot.

I mean, I haven't gotten a chance to look at the text yet (the Man's riding me hard this week), so here's an attempt at articulating why I'm resisting this Avril-killed-Himself theory: what's the point? I've mentioned a couple reasons why it seems more likely to me that Himself did commit suicide, as advertised. Maybe they're not overwhelmingly compelling to everybody, but what's even one reason why Avril would have killed him (preferably one that advances some theme/motif/plot strand already established in the book)? The people who suggest that Avril is more of a sinister character than she first appears are usually making the argument that she's working for the AFR and/or is Luria Perec. The former seems plausible to me; the latter seems less plausible, but it's up for debate, and I can imagine how it would fit into the novel in a big-picture sense. I'm having a hard time coming up with good reasons to have Avril kill her husband, and then to obscure that fact so effectively with the suicide story, including introducing plot elements that seem to depend on the suicide to make them make sense. And, incidentally--if Avril is indeed working with the AFR, I don't see how that's motivation to kill Himself.

I'm not saying it's a stupid idea or anything--like fish said, it's reasonable to think Wallace might have expected people to make the connection. I'm just saying: okay, so what?

I thought that Himself was trying to fuck with the original of The Entertainment, which was inside his head. Isn't that why Hal & Gately dig him up?

Or am I misremembering?

16: I am not sure of the "So What" behind this yet. It could be that the main thing that this suggests is that Avril is a ruthless character, which already seems to be an accepted theory by many.

As to what other directions this might be going...I am still ruminating. I have several theories, most of which are, at this point, somewhere along the lines of "Major Burns' name is a signal of the apocalypse."

How about this: Himself really does kill himself, technically--as in, he's the one who rigs the microwave and chooses to do so on April Fool's Day. After all, do Avril or CT have this kind of technical capacity or dark humor? I don't think so. But as in Hamlet, this is the case of a father who blames others for his death. A number of Himself's film plots are about miserable cuckolds, and he's a rabid drunk who doesn't really have the capacity to take the "Responsibility" that the novel touts as one of the cornerstones of AA. Remember that Gately thinks to himself while talking to the wraith that this is a guy who's still very much wrapped up in an addictive mentality. So as far as Himself is concerned, Avril and CT killed him, or at least were the direct cause of his suicide.

There is in fact textual evidence to support a claim that Avril was the killer of JOI.

On page 250 (paperback), Hal tells Orin on the phone: 'And there was a large and half-full bottle of Wild Turkey found on the counter not far away, with a large red decorative giftwrappish bow on the neck.'

On page 791, during R. Tine's interrogation of Molly Notkin, notes from the interview transcript state, "—That it did not strike her, Molly Notkin, as improbable that the special limited-edition turkey-shaped gift bottle of Wild Turkey Blended Whiskey-brand distilled spirits with the cerise velveteen gift-ribbon around its neck with the bow tucked under its wattles on the kitchen counter next to the microwave oven before which the Auteur's body had been found so ghastlyly inclined had been placed there by the spouse's widow-to-be — who may well have been enraged by the fact that the Auteur had never been willing to give up spirits quote 'for her' but had apparently been willing to give them up quote 'for' Madame Psychosis and her nude appearance in his final opus."

(The 'ghastlyly' above is quoted sic-ly... instead of 'ghastily,' he made an adverbial creation of an adjective ending in '-ly' by adding '-ly', jeez.)

So, depending on how much you trust the Molly Notkin character (she's the one who hosted the party that Joelle went to), you can take this info at face value. Avril might've murdered JOI outright, then placed the half-empty bottle on the counter as a cover-up. Or she might have given JOI the bottle as a gift (for what?) and he might've drunk half of it and committed suicide. Or someone else might've given him the gift, and Avril simply put the bottle on the counter out of disgust after she had found the half-empty bottle and the dead JOI.

But Infinite Jest contains a lot (an infinite amount?) of 'red herrings' if you will, and trying to piece together information from dozens of characters (many of whom are shown to be unreliable liars) is difficult. I suppose I subscribe to the idea that JOI took his own life from internal and external pressures — internal pressures from his obsession with his work, which he didn't feel was going in a good direction; external pressures from family woes, including a philandering wife, one son who moved away and ignored him (Orin), another who is numb to emotion and ignores him (Hal), and another who adores him but is physically handicapped (Mario).

Someone above made the point that it has to be suicide in order for Orin to have motivation to send out the Infinite Jest packages. I disagree. It simply had to appear as suicide to Orin (who has been away from the family and has to grill Hal to get any kind of info about Himself's death so he can feed that info to his reporter/USA agent in drag). Which makes me think: if Orin was disgusted enough by his father (and Himself's rumored fling with Joelle that is hotly contested by people throughout the book) to move away and ignore him, why is he motivated so much by his death to send out Infinite Jest to Himself's tormentors? Some kind of epiphany? I don't know if I buy that. (Though I do subscribe to the Orin-as-package-sender idea.)

What a great book.

P.S., page citations were found via this handy scene summary of IJ: http://faculty.sunydutchess.edu/oneill/Infinite.htm

>20 justindlc: Very interesting post. It made me reread the thread.

Little geek's post in #17 makes a hell of a lot of sense in retrospect as to why JOI (assuming he did eliminate his own map and wasn't murdered by Avril) did it the way he did it.

Makes me want to reread the damn book again.

Let's do it! I'm ready for a re-read!

Just finished the book for the first time maybe three weeks ago and stumbled upon this thread by googling "Avril kills Himself," because, three weeks later, I was thinking about the Wild Turkey Bottle which Avril may or may not have placed next to Himself and the Microwave and started to wonder what else she may or may not have done. I also feel like she turns out to be much more sinister than she initially appeared, Luria P--- seems like a stretch, but I believe in one of the Marathe passages it's insinuated that Avril, along with John Wayne and Poutincourt was working with the A.F.R. After reading through this thread, I'm pretty sure, and I feel like, as opposed to other authors who frequently leave things "up to interpretation," Wallace actually wants the reader to figure out his intended meaning in the text, that we're meant to gather that Himself did in fact kill himself (the intrinsic paradox, which has DFW chuckling quietly over a keyboard all over it, as another tidbit of support.)

In addition to all the support above, let's also consider the fact that J.O.I. was an exceptionally smart guy, and named not only what he hoped would be the most important work of his career after a line in Hamlet, but also produced several films under the banner of Poor Yorrick Entertainment -- so, I think it's safe to assume that the guy was familiar with the work, and if we assume that, it seems within reason to draw the very meta conclusion that Himself himself was painfully aware of how much his own family dynamic resembled that of Hamlet's.

Since we know his ultimate goal in creating IJ V was to somehow break through to Hal, and we also know that he was probably aware of Avril's adultery for a very long time leading up to that point, I think there's evidence to support Himself's ultimate decision to commit suicide stems more from his failure to sever Avril's toxic influence on his family, specifically Hal, who we also know, I believe from an Orin passage, and via his exacting views on grammar, and his own description of the moms tendency to show you exactly how you were going to hurt her and then make you do it anyway (which is also the closest thing to expressing feelings we get from Hal pre-Y.O.G.,) is somewhat Oedipally obsessed with making Avril proud of him. Perhaps, it was J.O.I.'s hope that, via his death, in the same way that Hamlet's own father's death leads him to demonize his own Mother and Uncle, he might be able to break through that barrier and ultimately save Hal. Sort of a last act of desperation kind of thing.

Best book I've ever read, hands down.

That makes a scary amount of sense, actually... it's been too long since I've read the book but it sounds plausible, particularly given the Hamlet references.

Yeah, and that's a scary post because it makes me want to read IJ again!

> 22, 25 I'll do it!! What is the matter with us?????

Dare we try again?

26> What is the matter with us?????
--maybe we're just nuts?
27> i'll give it another go if you guys are game.

I never did get beyond the first chapter

I just checked and I had made it to page 121, notes and all, before giving out. I was enjoying it, so I'll likely return to it someday.

28 it sounds like we are saying yes...

I hope that someone replies, i see this is an old thread but here is what i think, having read the book twice and once again chronologically ---

we see "the Oedipus complex" almost as prevalent as we see hamlet references, and since there is no stone un-turned in DFW's world we have to suppose a few things ...

I think orin killed his father and F***ed his mother (producing Mario)

Avril, having her persona similar to Atlas with the world on her stoic shoulders has an alternate, aggressive life of Luria P, who seeks to punish Orin for his misdeeds.

-----

I have so many thoughts on this book that I hope to get a reply so we can dig deeper!

obrigado!

I wonder...must evidence come in the form of some characters (generally unreliable) testimony? Or can we look at the book's design features for clues external to the plot. For example, the coincidence between the April Fool's day death and the name Avril? Could JOI have rigged the microwave himself...but with some other purpose than suicide.

I also wonder what to make of the parallel between JOI's demise and Otis' Eschaton debacle. This seems interesting in light of the idea that Otis had the bed next to JOI when the wraith gets access to Gately.

Nah. She didn't kill him. She likely may have driven him to kill himself, after he had taken steps to make revenge on her, but he undoubtedly did himself in. I think the Hamlet similarity is on point, but her conduct is what may have driven him to suicide.