“On the Porousness of Certain Borders”: Attending to Objects in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest

Abstract

Roughly halfway through David Foster Wallace’s mammoth and labyrinthine 1996 novel Infinite Jest, the character Don Gately—a recov ering drug addict and live-in employee of a halfway house in Boston, Massachusetts—encounters a biker named Bob Death at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. In an exchange between the two, Bob tells Gately a joke whose punchline becomes crucial in ferreting out the novel’s thematic crux and indeed the ethical perspective of its author. Having asked Gately whether he has “by any chance … heard the one about the fish” (445), Bob Death recites a joke that was later reused by the novel’s author in a commencement speech delivered at Kenyon College in 2005 (collected post