Infinite Digest

I first read David Foster Wallace’s mammoth novel during my time living in late-90s Boston, walking the same streets and squares as the book’s characters.

It was hard not to be dazzled by the surface-level details, particularly the exquisite language and a bracingly parodic view of American culture that felt like a periscope pointed at the 21st century four years ahead of time. But even in my initial reading, I sensed something deeper was at work in its Hamlet parallels, annular narrative, and the way interacting with the book’s heft and extensive footnotes felt like an analogue for its central theme of addiction.

Now, 30 years after its initial publication, I’m revisiting Infinite Jest and exploring those old intuitions about its structure by visualizing them. Part reader’s guide and part analytical tool, this collection of interactive graphics is my attempt to give readers a unifying view of the book’s whirlwind of characters, narratives, and interlinked references.

Plotlines

Every episode from the book, reordered chronologically with a breakdown of which characters were present

All Those Footnotes

The distribution of footnote references in the main text and the sizes of the notes at the end of the book

Coming Soon

Chronology vs. Narrative Order

The relationship between the order of events in the story and the order in which they are presented in the novel

Coming in Summer 2026

Character Arcs

Each character’s path through the novel, both chronologically and narratively

Coming in Fall 2026

Social Networks

Interactions between characters across the various groups in the novel's separate plotlines

Coming in Fall 2026

Sketchbook

References + Acknowledgments

The data used to create these visualizations can be downloaded as a collection of csv files or viewed as a spreadsheet. They collect, annotate, and expand upon the research of several others who did the original work of untangling Infinite Jest's skein of characters and plot:

Stephen Burn wrote A Reader’s Guide (2012) for i.j. with an espeically useful appendix laying out the novel’s chronology and providing capsule summaries that were the basis for the Plotlines visualization.

Greg Carlisle wrote Elegant Complexity (2007) which identifies the themes and characters present in each of the novel’s episodes, summarizing them with an apposite quote from each.

Drew Cordes created a full chronology drawing from an existing timeline and Burn’s Reader’s Guide, providing a mapping between the narrative and chronological ‘locations’ of each episodes.

Timothy Feeney wrote biographical sketches for dozens of the novel’s characters which served as the model for the bios in the Plotlines visualization.