The Surprising Happy Ending of Infinite Jest

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Part from when I was talking to my friend H, and part from lingering thoughts from the text, I couldn’t help but wonder if Hal’s inability to speak at the beginning (last scene temporally) of the novel comes from a form of learned helplessness. In my last post I mentioned the theme of Escaping, whether it be displayed in Infinite Jest, in DFW’s other works, or even in DFW’s biography, and can’t help but wonder if I was wrong, that it was not Escaping that I was seeing, but rather a sense of Asking For Help. I wrote previously about the Inner Infant scene, and admittedly I omitted discussing the group’s chanting of “Needs, Needs, Needs,” (808) because I couldn’t make anything of it; however, now I see that Hal’s ‘Need’ for help has been staring me in the face the whole time. Hannah brings up issues of Himself trying to bring Hal out and talk to him, but Himself doesn’t listen. I want to claim that Hal’s lack of being heard throughout growing up (with reference to scenes of Himself and Hal) creates learned helplessness for Hal, that in the first scene, Hal can’t talk. Or rather, that there is no way he can convey his message to his audience. Everything prior to this sentence was before I looked over the first chapter again. From the first time I read the first chapter, I felt that there was something significant that I kept over-looking and somehow it would be vital to the novel’s ending—especially having Pemulis expelled from ETA, and having Gately and Joelle’s plot unsatisfied, the novel seems to close with a dissatisfaction of the reader.

Now, I’m going to argue that the novel DOES satisfy our wants for Hal to get better—I don’t mean that he is perfectly well, but that he does have