DFW, in an interview with Larry King, defended the notes as a way to “fracture” the time line of the reading. Since the entire book is told in anything but chronological order, the notes are integral to the fracturing. He fought with the publisher over them.

You’re not missing much by using the Kindle. The point is that the author wrote the notes at a later time (the time of the telling) so each time you jump to a note you are jumping to a kind of post-script temporally, and that jumping is one of the big points of the notes. Vonnegutian, in that respect.

BTW: I used four bookmarks. One for the main, one for the notes, one for the notes on the notes, and one for page 223.

Wallace asks a generation he sees as being most threatened by addiction, over-entertainment and selling out their values (selling year-numbers to corporations, including those for trash bags and adult undergarments), among other things, to buy a 1,000+ page book, and not only to read it, but in the course of reading it, to have to reaffirm their decision to read it repeatedly while reading it. Every time an endnote appears, the reader, knowing they have hundreds of pages to go, has to decide, ‘Am I going to go to the back to read this endnote in tiny font, only adding to this challenge, or do I just continue on and skip it?’ Even if you skip it, you have to decide to skip it. But to skip it forces you to ask the question of why read this in the first place if you’re not going to read the whole thing? You can’t take full pride in having the thing on your bookshelf, telling yourself and others you’ve read it if you know you didn’t really read it all. Even if you simply want to read them, it is still a bit of a chore, and I think most important of all, a forcing of self-consciousness, to go to the back and read them. You still have to decide to go to the back and read it, and cannot simply continue on being entertained ‘unconsciously’, or without the experience of any agency.

I think Wallace was deeply bothered by the aspects of modern American life that did not allow for ‘authenticity’. Authenticity was a large theme for him in many of his works, both fiction and nonfiction. Heidegger, for all his faults, had an interesting idea about authenticity. To put it simply, he thought that we are our authentic selves when we are are self-conscious. When we could be ‘replaced’ by some other individual who would be playing our role so to speak, without loss, then we are not truly authentic. When our attention is directed outward toward the world, increasingly in our times, being entertained by it, there is some sense in which ‘anyone’ could be entertained in such a way (at least many, many others). Only when something interrupts that flow of experience, bringing our attention to ourselves and our own experience and capacity for choice, then nobody else can play that role for us. If this all seems like hogwash, then just think of it as a passive/active distinction, with choice and reflection on ourselves and our actions as quintessentially opposed to passive retreat into entertainment-as-distraction.

The people on this blog have remarked on the self-consciousness that attends reading Infinite Jest, the consciousness *that one is reading Infinite Jest*. The endnotes force you to repeatedly renew that commitment, by interrupting the flow of your experience and having you make a choice–is this really what you want to be doing? If so, then Wallace has not only succeeded in entertaining you, but has done so in a way that strikes at the inauthenticy he fears and loathes, not only through the content of his work, but also its form. Other difficult books may prompt in us the question, do I really want to be doing this? But Wallace prompts that question as part of the novel’s very structure, which reflects its, and his, overarching theme.

by the way, love your blog Matt.