The Year of the Whopper appeared in the original manuscript as 'The Year of the Twinkie' and character names were changed around Orin Incandenza was originally 'Cully' in the first draft and also appeared as 'Hugh' in early versions.Ĥ.

For example, 'instead of a crisis in southern Quebec, Wallace originally set the crisis in Sierra Leone.' In addition, the first draft begins not with Hal's college interview in Arizona, but rather his meeting with his father who is disguised as a professional conversationalist. Moore cataloged the changes Wallace made from that initial version to the final, published copy. Merely flipping through the 4-inch-high manuscript would give even a seasoned editor the howling fantods.'ģ. Throughout there are notes in the margins, reminders to fix something or other, adjustments to chronology (which seems to have given Wallace quite a bit of trouble), even a few drawings and doodles. Much of it is single-spaced, and what footnotes existed at this stage appear at the bottom of pages. 22 is followed by 22A-J before resuming with p.

Moore knew Wallace when Wallace was teaching at Illinois State, and he was one of three people to see the early manuscript. He describes it as ' mess-a patchwork of different fonts and point sizes, with numerous handwritten corrections/additions on most pages, and paginated in a nesting pattern (e.g., p.

Fantastic online Wallace compendium The Howling Fantods has Steven Moore's notes on the first draft of Infinite Jest. The other banality would be: I wanted to do something real American, about what it's like to live in America around the millennium.' The novel has quite the title considering its author's healthy fear of irony.Ģ. And I wanted it not to have a single main character. 'I'd done some funny stuff and some heavy, intellectual stuff, but I'd never done anything sad. 'I wanted to do something sad,' he said in an interview with Salon shortly after its publication in 1996. Wallace began writing Infinite Jest in earnest in 1991. Here are 15 brief facts about Wallace's sprawling work (which produces about 15 fascinating moments a sentence).ġ. It's not a stretch (or very original) to call Infinite Jest the defining work of the 1990s. David Foster Wallace's second novel is set in an absurd (but agonizingly believable) near-future, and it explores addiction, entertainment, pleasure, commerce, technology, and tennis-lots and lots of tennis.

The infinite jest