The Brothers Incandenza: Translating Ideology in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

Abstract

I disagree with Boswell simply based on the poor logic of the claim that the Dostoevsky allusion is insignificant because it is the more subtly embedded of the primary intertextual allusions. Second, I contend that Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is much more important to Wallace's overall aesthetic agenda than the more obvious Shakespeare allusion. Wallace has patterned Infinite Jest so meticulously after Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (1880) that in many significant ways, Infinite Jest is a rewriting or figurative translation of The Brothers Karamazov into the contemporary American idiom and context.2 First, it is clear from Wallace's