ADDICTION TO ITSELF:

 

SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS IN DAVID FOSTER WALLACE’S INFINITE JEST

 

 

by

 

Derek Edward Wayne

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A thesis submitted to the

Department of English and

American Literature and Language

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Bachelor’s

Degree with Honors

 

                                    Harvard College

                                    Cambridge, Massachusetts

 

March 14, 2001

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Table of Contents

 

Introduction                                                                                                                1

 

I. The Metafictional Monologue: Sincerity With a Motive                                             4

 

II. Mirror, Mirror: Limitations and the Transfinite                                           14

 

III. Something Will Have Been Predicted: Sounding the Private Language         35

 

Conclusion                                                                                                              59

 

Notes                                                                                                                       62

 

Bibliography                                                                                                             63

 

Acknowledgements                                                                                                  66

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes on the Text

 

All parenthetical citations are for Infinite Jest unless otherwise noted or implied.

 

All italics are from the original quotations.

 

All ellipses are added.

 

Citations for Philosophical Investigations, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and The Society of the Spectacle are in paragraph/thesis numbers.

 

The texts and numerical assignations of Emily Dickinson’s poems are taken from the Thomas H. Johnson edition of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Boston: Little, Brown, 1951.

 

Abbreviated citations:

PI = Philosophical Investigations

SFT = A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

Interview = “An Interview with David Foster Wallace”