Editing Infinite Jest (section)

==Literary connections==
''Infinite Jest'' draws explicitly or allusively on many previous works of literature.

As its title implies, the novel is in part based on the play ''[[Hamlet]]''. Enfield Tennis Academy corresponds to [[Denmark]], ruled by James ([[Ghost (Hamlet)|King Hamlet]]) and Avril ([[Gertrude (Hamlet)|Queen Gertrude]]). When James dies, he is replaced by Charles ([[King Claudius|Claudius]]), the uncle of Avril's gifted son Hal ([[Prince Hamlet]]). As in the play, the son's task is to fight incipient mental breakdown in order to redeem his father's reputation.<ref>{{Citation |last=Walsh |first=James Jason Jr |title=American Hamlet: Shakespearean Epistemology In David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest |date=August 2014 |url=https://etd.ohiolink.edu/apexprod/rws_olink/r/1501/10?p10_etd_subid=98834&clear=10 |publisher=Cleveland State University}}</ref>

Another link is to the ''[[Odyssey]]'', wherein the son [[Telemachus]] (Hal) has to grow apart from his dominating mother [[Penelope]] (Avril) and discover the truth about his absent father [[Odysseus]] (James). (That pattern is also reproduced in the novel ''[[Ulysses (novel)|Ulysses]]'', set in a realistic version of [[Dublin]] populated by a wide range of inhabitants, just as ''Infinite Jest'' is mostly in a realistic Boston with a varied population.<ref name="burn readers guide">{{Citation |last=Burn |first=Stephen |title=David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A reader's guide |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=xJ6U1VK3SRcC |year=2003 |publisher=A&C Black |isbn=978-0826414779 |access-date=7 June 2016}}</ref>) In one scene, Hal, on the phone with Orin, says that clipping his toenails into a wastebasket "now seems like an exercise in telemachry." Orin then asks whether Hal meant telemetry. Christopher Bartlett has argued that Hal's mistake is a direct reference to Telemachus, who for the first four books of the ''Odyssey'' believes that his father is dead.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Bartlett |first=Christopher |date=8 June 2016 |title="An Exercise in Telemachry": David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and Intergenerational Conversation |journal=[[Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction]] |volume=57 |issue=4 |pages=374–389 |doi=10.1080/00111619.2015.1113921 |s2cid=148474511}}</ref>

Links to ''[[The Brothers Karamazov]]'' have been analyzed by Timothy Jacobs, who sees Orin representing the nihilistic Dmitri, Hal standing for Ivan and Mario the simple and good [[Alyosha Karamazov|Alyosha]].<ref>{{Citation |last=Max |first=D. T. |title=Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=fTzmRoY3z_IC&pg=PA288 |page=288 |year=2012 |publisher=Penguin |isbn=978-1101601112 |access-date=8 June 2016}}</ref>

The film so entertaining that its viewers lose interest in anything else has been likened to the [[Monty Python]] sketch "[[The Funniest Joke in the World]]", as well as to "the [[experience machine]]", a thought experiment by [[Robert Nozick]].<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Sloane |first=Peter |year=2014 |title=The Divided Selves of David Foster Wallace |journal=Tropos |volume=1 |issue=1 |pages=67–73 |doi=10.14324/111.2057-2212.011 |doi-access=free}}</ref>