Editing Infinite Jest (section)

==Major characters==

===The Incandenza family===
* '''Hal Incandenza''' is the youngest of the Incandenza children and arguably the novel's [[protagonist]], as its events revolve around his time at E.T.A. Hal is prodigiously intelligent and talented, but insecure about his abilities (and eventually his mental state). His friend Michael Pemulis calls him Inc, and his favorite thing to do is secretly smoke marijuana in the seclusion of the E.T.A. tunnels. He has difficult relationships with both his parents. He has an [[eidetic memory]] and has memorized the ''[[Oxford English Dictionary]]'', and like his mother often corrects his friends' and family's grammar. Hal's mental degradation and [[Social alienation|alienation]] from those around him culminate in his chronologically last appearance in the novel, in which his attempts at speech and facial expressions are incomprehensible to others. The origin of Hal's final condition is unclear; possible causes include marijuana withdrawal, a drug obtained by Michael Pemulis, a patch of mold Hal ate as a child, and a mental breakdown from years of training to be a top junior tennis player.<ref>{{Cite web |title=What Happens at the End of Infinite Jest? |url=http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend |access-date=2014-02-06 |publisher=[[Aaron Swartz]]}}</ref>
* '''Avril Incandenza''', née '''Mondragon''', is the domineering mother of the Incandenza children and wife of James. A tall (197&nbsp;cm, or 6&nbsp;ft. 5.5 in.), beautiful [[Québécois people|francophone Quebecer]], she becomes a major figure at Enfield Tennis Academy after her husband's suicide and begins, or perhaps continues, a relationship with Charles Tavis, the school's new head, also a Canadian and Avril's either adoptive or half-brother. Her sexual relationships with men are a matter of some speculation/discussion; one with John "No Relation" Wayne is depicted. Avril has phobias about uncleanliness and disease, closed doors, and overhead lighting, and is also described as [[agoraphobic]]. She has an obsessive-compulsive need to watch over E.T.A. and her two youngest sons, Hal and Mario, who live at the school; Avril and Orin are no longer in contact. James Incandenza believes that he can connect with his children only through her. Orin believes she runs the family with ingrained manipulation and the illusion of choice. Her family nickname is "the Moms".
* '''James Orin Incandenza Jr.''', Avril's husband and Orin's, Mario's and Hal's father, is an optics expert and filmmaker as well as the founder of Enfield Tennis Academy (though he increasingly leaves E.T.A. business to Charles Tavis). The son of small-time actor James O. Incandenza Sr. (who played "The Man from [[Glad (company)|Glad]]" in the 1960s), James Jr. created ''Infinite Jest'' (also known as "the Entertainment" or "the [[samizdat]]"), an enigmatic and fatally seductive film that was his last work. He used Joelle van Dyne, his son Orin's strikingly beautiful girlfriend, in many of his films, including the fatal "Entertainment". He appears in the book mainly either in [[flashback (literary technique)|flashback]]s or as a "wraith", having killed himself at the age of 54 by placing his head in a [[microwave oven]]. He is an alcoholic who drinks [[Wild Turkey (bourbon)|Wild Turkey]] whiskey. His family nickname is "Himself". Orin also calls him "the Mad Stork" or (once) "the Sad Stork".
* '''Mario Incandenza''' is the Incandenzas' second son, although his biological father may be Charles Tavis. Severely deformed since birth—he is [[Macrocephaly|macrocephalic]], [[homodont]]ic, [[bradykinesia|bradykinetic]], and stands or walks at a 45-degree angle—as well as mentally "slow", he is nonetheless perennially cheerful and kind. He is also a budding [[auteur]], having served as James's camera and directorial assistant and later inheriting the prodigious studio equipment and film lab his father built on the academy grounds. Somewhat surprisingly, he is an avid fan of Madame Psychosis's dark radio show, partly because he finds her voice familiar. Hal, though younger, acts like a supportive older brother to Mario, whom Hal calls "Booboo".
* '''Orin Incandenza''' is the Incandenzas' eldest son. He is a [[Punter (American football)|punter]] for the [[Arizona Cardinals|Phoenix Cardinals]] and a serial womanizer, and is estranged from everyone in his family except Hal. It is suggested that Orin lost his attraction to Joelle after she became disfigured when her mother unintentionally threw acid in her face during a Thanksgiving dinner, but Orin cites Joelle's questionable relationship with his father as the reason for the breakup even though he later admits he knows there was no romance. Orin focuses his subsequent womanizing on young mothers; Hal suggests that this is because he blames his father's death on his mother. Molly Notkin, a friend of Joelle's, says that Orin has numerous "malcathected issues with his mother". Orin's relationship with his father was tense. His father tells Joelle "he simply didn't know how to speak with either of his undamaged sons without their mother's presence and mediation. Orin could not be made to shut up."<ref name=":0">{{Cite book |last=Foster Wallace |first=David |title=Infinite Jest |publisher=Little, Brown and Company |year=1996 |isbn=978-0-316-92004-9 |location=New York, NY |page=743}}</ref>

===The Enfield Tennis Academy===

* '''Michael Pemulis''', a working-class teenager from an Allston, Massachusetts family, and Hal's best friend. A prankster and the school's resident drug dealer, Pemulis is also very proficient in mathematics. This, combined with his limited but ultraprecise lobbing, made him the school's first master of Eschaton, a computer-aided [[Turn-based game|turn-based]] nuclear [[Wargaming|wargame]] that requires players to be adept at both [[game theory]] and lobbing tennis balls at targets. Although the novel takes place long after Pemulis's Eschaton days (the game is played by 12- to 14-year-olds), Pemulis is still regarded as the game's all-time greatest player, and he remains the final court of appeal for the game. His brother, Matty, is a gay hustler who as a child was sexually abused by their father.
* '''John "No Relation" Wayne''', the top-ranked player at E.T.A. He is frighteningly efficient, controlled, and machine-like on the court. Wayne is almost never directly quoted in the narrative; his statements are either summarized by the narrator or repeated by other characters. His Canadian citizenship has been revoked since he came to E.T.A. His father is a sick asbestos miner in Quebec who hopes John will soon start earning "serious $" in "the Show" (professional tennis) to "take him away from all this". Pemulis discovers Wayne is having a sexual relationship with Avril Incandenza, and it is later revealed that Hal is also aware of the relationship. Wayne may be sympathetic to, or actively supporting, the radical Quebec separatists.
* '''Ortho "The Darkness" Stice''', another of Hal's close friends. His name consists of the Greek root ''ortho'' ("straight") and the anglicized suffix ''-stice'' ("a space") from the noun ''interstice'', which originally derived from the Latin verb ''sistere'' ("to stand"). He endorses only brands that have black-colored products, and is at all times clothed entirely in black, hence his nickname. Late in the book Stice nearly defeats Hal in a three-set tennis match, shortly after which his forehead is frozen to a window and his bed appears either bolted or mysteriously levitated to the ceiling. There are indications that Stice is being visited by the ghost of James Incandenza.
* '''Lyle''', E.T.A. weight room guru. He spends most of his time perched atop the towel dispenser in the lotus position. Lyle licks the sweat off the boys' bodies after they work out and in turn gives them life advice. His behavior is described by the narrator as unusual but "nothing faggy". Lyle is close to Mario, whom he sometimes employs to speak to players who struggle with self-esteem.

===Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House===
* '''Don Gately''', a former thief and [[Demerol]] addict, and current counselor in residence at Ennet House. One of the novel's primary characters, Gately is physically enormous and a reluctant but dedicated [[Alcoholics Anonymous]] member. He is critically wounded in an altercation with several Canadian men, and much of the later part of the novel involves his inner monologue while he recuperates in a Boston hospital. Gately had a complicated childhood. His stepfather abused his mother. During his middle-school and high-school years, Gately's size made him a formidable football talent. During his period as an addict and burglar, he accidentally kills M. DuPlessis, a leader of one of the many separatist Québécois organizations featured in the novel. Gately is visited by the ghosts of James O. Incandenza and Lyle.
* '''Joelle van Dyne''', also known as "Madame Psychosis" (cf. [[metempsychosis]]), a stage name she received from James Incandenza when she starred in his films (and later her on-air name in her radio show "60+/−"). She became acquainted with James through her college relationship with Orin Incandenza, who referred to her as "The Prettiest Girl of All Time", or P.G.O.A.T. She appears in the lethally addictive Entertainment, reaching down toward a wobbly "neonatal" lens as if it were in a bassinet and apologizing profusely, her face blurred beyond recognition. Extremely beautiful as a young woman, Joelle later becomes a member of the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed (U.H.I.D.), and wears a veil to hide her face. According to Molly Notkin, Joelle's face was disfigured by a beaker of acid her mother threw, intending to hit Joelle's father, who had just revealed he was in love with her (Joelle). Joelle says she wears the veil because her superlative attractiveness plagued her throughout her life, causing her to suffer social and romantic isolation until she met Orin. Joelle tries to "eliminate her own map" (that is, [[suicide]]) in Notkin's bathroom by massive ingestion of freebase [[cocaine]], which lands her in Ennet House as a resident. Gately and Joelle develop a mutual attraction.
* '''Randy Lenz''', a "small time organic-coke dealer who wears sportcoats rolled up over his parlor-tanned forearms and is always checking his pulse on the inside of his wrists". An Ennet House resident, he constantly asks the time but refuses to wear a watch and regularly violates the sobriety rule.
* '''Geoffrey Day''', an Ennet House resident who struggles with the clichés of AA. He comes to Ennet House after putting his car through a sporting-goods store window.<ref>{{Cite web |title=David Foster Wallace, 'Infinite Jest' And Lessons In Empathy-The ARTery |url=http://www.wbur.org/artery/2016/03/07/david-foster-wallace-empathy |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181001235857/http://www.wbur.org/artery/2016/03/07/david-foster-wallace-empathy |archive-date=2018-10-01 |access-date=2019-07-29}}</ref>

===Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents===

Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents (A.F.R.), the Wheelchair Assassins, are a Québécois separatist group. (The use of "rollents" where "roulants" would be correct is in keeping with other erroneous French words and phrases in the novel.) They are one of many such groups that developed after the United States coerced Canada and Mexico into joining the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.), but the A.F.R. is the most deadly and extremist. While other separatist groups are willing to settle for nationhood, the A.F.R. wants Canada to secede from O.N.A.N. and to reject America's forced gift of its polluted "Great Concavity" (or, Hal and Orin speculate, is pretending that those are its goals to put pressure on Canada to let Quebec secede). The A.F.R. seeks the master copy of ''Infinite Jest'' as a terrorist weapon to achieve its goals. The A.F.R. has its roots in a childhood game in which miners' sons would line up alongside a train track and compete to be the last to jump across the path of an oncoming train, a game in which many were killed, or, otherwise, rendered legless (the wheelchair-bound members of the group all lost their legs in this way.).

Only one miner's son ever (disgracefully) failed to jump—Bernard Wayne, who may be related to E.T.A.'s John Wayne. Québécoise Avril's liaisons with John Wayne, and with A.F.R.'s Guillaume DuPlessis and Luria Perec,<ref>p.30</ref> suggest that Avril may have ties to the A.F.R. as well. There is also evidence linking E.T.A. prorector Thierry Poutrincourt to the group.
* '''Rémy Marathe''' is a member of the Wheelchair Assassins who secretly talks to Hugh/Helen Steeply. Marathe is a quadruple agent: the A.F.R. thinks that he is a triple agent, only pretending to betray the A.F.R., while Marathe and Steeply know that he only pretends to pretend to betray them. He does this in order to secure medical support for his wife (who was born without a skull) from the Office of Unspecified Services. Late in the novel, Marathe is sent to infiltrate Ennet House in the guise of a Swiss drug addict.

===Other recurring characters===

These characters cross between the major narrative threads:
* '''Hugh Steeply''', an agent who assumes a female identity ("Helen") for an operative role, with whom Orin Incandenza becomes obsessed. Hugh works for the government Office of Unspecified Services and has gone undercover to get information out of Orin about the Entertainment. He is the U.S.O.U.S.'s contact with the A.F.R. mole Marathe.
* '''"Poor Tony" Krause''', a cross-dressing junkie and thief who steals a woman's exterior heart, causing her death, and later robs Ennet House residents.
*  '''Marlon Bain''', a former E.T.A. student who was close to Orin. His obsessive-compulsive disorder has made it nearly impossible for him to leave his apartment. Steeply contacts him for information about Orin and the Incandenzas.