YMMV / Infinite Jest

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• Crowning Moment of Heartwarming: Mario touching the hand of someone forced to be homeless when nobody else would.
• Genius Bonus: Many references to various fields ranging from classical mythology to optical physics.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The depiction of mental illness, depression and suicide, since Wallace erased his own map.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • That part about Orin getting onto Boston University's football team? One year after the novel was published, the university disbanded its football team.
  • The story being set 20 Minutes into the Future, most people communicate via teleconferencing instead of phones. And many people use special filters to make themselves look better than they do in real life.
• Hype Backlash: The novel's length and complexity has earned it a hatedom, similar to Gravity's Rainbow, claiming that it's overwritten and pretentious.
• Memetic Mutation: Infinite Jest has become a punchline about the reading tastes of pretentious intellectual men, or at least men who want to appear intellectual. People who invoke the meme believe Infinite Jest is overly complex and not really very good. To some extent, this has become a Discredited Meme because of how judgy it is.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • In the first scene, the main character hears himself communicating completely calmly and rationally with those around him. Those around him hear him screaming in horrific pain, convulsing like he's absolutely lost his mind, to the point where they call an ambulance. And, Orin and the cockroaches.
  • After the lengthy description of Randy Lenz's nightly walks, Wallace makes absolutely sure to add the detail that there are no locks on any of the doors in Ennet House.
  • James Incandenza's death by putting his head in a microwave oven. Worse, it's Hal - at thirteen - who finds him.
  • Limbic system lobotomies.
• Porting Disaster: The audiobook version is effectively unusable because of how it's formatted. The main text and endnotes are separate files (that are sold separately, not as sub-downloads to allow listening to begin sooner in older audiobooks), and the endnotes have paused between each endnote of one or two seconds. As a result, the only way to listen to the audiobook is to have both files downloaded to a device, immediately pause upon mention of an endnote, switch files, and then hover one's finger over the pause button to keep the next endnote from immediately playing at the conclusion of this one, then manually switch back to the previous file.

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