Dorothea’s Will in George Eliot’s Middlemarch: Expectations & Compromises

     Like Saint Theresa, Middlemarch’s own Dorothea Brooke bursts with immense will to help others. George Eliot introduces Theresa in the novel’s prelude suggesting that Dorothea represents a Theresa figure. Eliot gives us the provincial town Middlemarch where Dorothea lives, and here, Dorothea develops expectations of married life. In this town, she faces disappointment and the darkness of her husband’s death. After her trials and tribulations, Dorothea learns to save herself through compromise, and her perseverance comes from her saintly will.

From Depression to Displacement and Coping with the Whole: Hal’s Happy Ending in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest

In a 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery, David Foster Wallace said that “fiction’s about what it means to be a fucking human being.”¹ His opera omnia reflects his claim, especially Infinite Jest, in which Hal Incandenza struggles with depression and displacement. At the novel’s open, the first chapter shows the last scene, temporally, and upon the finishing of the novel, the first chapter appears to leave the story unresolved. However, Wallace’s ending gives an unexpected resolution that could easily appear ‘empty’.

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