Flashbacks
Infinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace

Infinite Jest: Flashbacks 1 key example

Chapter 71
Explanation and Analysis—Breathing Ceiling:

In Chapter 71, Gately wakes up in the hospital and notices that the ceiling looks like it is breathing. This personification leads him into a flashback to his impoverished childhood on the North Shore:

The ceiling was breathing. It bulged and receded. It swelled and settled. The room was in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital’s Trauma Wing. Whenever he looked at it, the ceiling bulged and then deflated, shiny as a lung. When Don was a massive toddler his mother had put them in a little beach house just back of the dunes off a public beach in Beverly. The place was affordable because it had a big ragged hole in the roof....The polyurethane [stapled over the hole] bulged and settled... like some monstrous vacuole inhaling and exhaling directly over little Gately, lying there, wide-eyed.