"End of the End of the Line": The Broken Temporality of David Foster Wallace’s "Infinite Jest"

The essay focuses on the temporal structure of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. By resorting to unnatural narratology and rhetorical analysis, I aim to make sense of its broken circular framework in light of two negative figures of speech (two figures of speech of subtraction): litotes and irony. A missed form, the broken circle encapsulating Infinite Jest’s temporality is understood as the temporal and morphological crystallization of Wallace’s sense of generational belatedness, which fostered his ambivalent, stubborn tailspin into the question of the perceived exhaustion of American fiction put forward by John Barth in the 1960s.