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Definition of Irony
Irony is a literary device or event in which how things seem to be is in fact very different from how they actually are. If this seems like a loose definition... read full definition
Irony is a literary device or event in which how things seem to be is in fact very different from how they actually are. If this... read full definition
Irony is a literary device or event in which how things seem to be is in fact very different from how... read full definition
Key Examples in Infinite Jest
Chapter 17
Explanation and Analysis—Choose Your Cause:
In Chapter 17, Marathe uses logos to criticize American patriotism and loyalty to fickle leaders like Rodney Tine. Steeply fires back, pointing out the situational irony of Marathe's argument:
‘Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. only pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.’
‘How are your wife and kids doing, up there, by the way?’
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Chapter 22
Explanation and Analysis—Canadian Separatism:
In Chapter 22, Orin calls Hal (a new development in the past year—previously, Orin never called). Right before Hal can hang up, Orin asks a question that foreshadows the revelation that dramatic irony has led him into a terrorist plot:
Unlock with LitCharts A+‘Uh oh. Dinnertime. Triangle’s a-clangin’ over in West.’
‘Hey Hallie though? Hang on. Kidding aside for a second. What all do you know about Separatism?’
Hal stopped for a moment. ‘You mean in Canada?’
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Chapter 29
Explanation and Analysis—Mold and Counterculture:
In Chapter 29, the narrator explains the origin of DMZ (a.k.a. Madame Psychosis), an extraordinarily hard-to-find drug that Pemulis acquires to share with Hal later in the term. The explanation includes several allusions and creates a sense of dramatic irony that is never quite resolved in the novel:
Unlock with LitCharts A+The incredibly potent DMZ is synthesized from a derivative of fitviavi, an obscure mold that grows only on other molds, by the same ambivalently lucky chemist at Sandoz Pharm. who’d first stumbled on LSD, as a relatively ephebic and clueless organic chemist, while futzing around with ergotic fungi on rye. DMZ’s discovery was the tail-end of the B.S. 1960s, just about the same time Dr. Alan Watts was considering T. Leary’s invitation to become ‘Writer in Resonance’ at Leary’s utopian LSD-25 colony in Millbrook NY on what is now Canadian soil.
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Chapter 36
Explanation and Analysis—Karen Carpenter:
In Chapter 36, Joelle almost dies of an overdose in Molly Notkin's bathroom. The music playing in the bathroom is an allusion that highlights the situational irony of Joelle's drug problem:
Unlock with LitCharts A+[S]he can’t stand it and reaches out for the cold tub’s rim’s cold edge to pull herself up as the white-party-noise reaches, for her, the sort of stereophonic precipice of volume to teeter on just before the speakers blow, people barely twitching and conversations strettoing against a ghastly old pre-Carter thing saying ‘We’ve Only Just Begun,’ Joelle’s limbs have been removed to a distance where their acknowledgment of her commands seems like magic...
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Chapter 43
Explanation and Analysis—Class Consciousness:
Chapter 43 offers a portrait of Gately, reformed and running things at Ennet House. Gately seems to find the work fulfilling and has clearly made impressive strides toward his own self-awareness, but the narrator nonetheless laughs at him over a moment of dramatic irony:
Unlock with LitCharts A+The best noise Gately produces is his laugh, which booms and reassures...He likes that Erdedy, sitting, looks right up at him and cocks his head slightly to let Gately know he’s got his full attention. Gately doesn’t know that this is a requisite for a white-collar job where you have to show you’re attending fully to clients who are paying major sums and get to expect an overt display of full attention. Gately is still not yet a good judge of anything about upscale people except where they tend to hide their valuables.
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Chapter 56
Explanation and Analysis—Therapy Speak:
In Chapter 56, Pemulis overhears part of a therapy session between Stice and Dr. Rusk. Rusk's extended explanation of her diagnosis, "counterphobia," is a parody of Freudian psychoanalysis that is steeped in dramatic irony:
Unlock with LitCharts A+‘GI Joe typically being cathected as an image of the potent but antagonistic father, the “military” man, with “GI” representing at once the “General Issue” of a “weapon” the Oedipal child both covets and fears and a well-known medical acronym for the gastro-intestinal tract, with all the attendant anal anxieties that require repression in the Oedipal phase’s desire to control the bowels in order to impress or quote “win” the mother, of whom the Barbie might be seen as the most obviously reductive and phallocentric reduction of the mother to an archetype of sexual function and availability, ..."
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Chapter 57
Explanation and Analysis—State Bird:
In Chapter 57, Randy Lenz and Bruce Green walk around the city at night. The passage is packed with imagery, including one image that Lenz comments on with verbal irony:
Unlock with LitCharts A+The State Bird of Massachusetts, [Lenz] shares to Green, is the police siren. To Project and to Swerve.
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Chapter 58
Explanation and Analysis—Madame Psychosis Tapes:
In Chapter 58, Mario overhears a recording of Madame Psychosis's voice through the window of Ennet House. This moment is a good example of both dramatic and situational irony:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Mario is arrested by the quiet but unmistakable sound of a recording of a broadcast of ‘Sixty Minutes More or Less with Madame Psychosis,’ which Mario has never taped a show of because he feels it wouldn’t be right for him but is strangely thrilled to hear someone in Ennet’s thinking enough of to tape and replay.
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Chapter 62
Explanation and Analysis—Carved Out:
In Chapter 62, Steeply visits E.T.A. undercover to find out more about The Entertainment. An exchange between deLint and Steeply at the end of the chapter contains a metaphor that highlights the situational irony of E.T.A.'s "protective" attitude toward its students:
Unlock with LitCharts A+‘...You’re coming into a little slice of space and/or time that’s been carved out to protect talented kids from exactly the kind of activities you guys come in here to do. Why Orin, anyway? The kid appears four times a game, never gets hit, doesn’t even wear pads. A one-trick pony....Wayne’s your ideal food-group. Which is why we’ll keep you off him as long as he’s here.’
The soft-profiler looked around at the scalps and knees in the stands, the bags of gear and a couple incongruous cans of furniture polish. ‘Carved out of what, though, this place?’
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Chapter 65
Explanation and Analysis—Burning Building:
Chapter 65 deals with the topic of suicide, as the narrator turns from Hal's understanding of depression and suicide to Kate Gompert's. Kate understands there to be two types of depression, the worse of which she makes sense of with a poignant, ironic metaphor:
Unlock with LitCharts A+The person in whom [clinical depression's] invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. [These people's] terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors.
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Chapter 70
Explanation and Analysis—Hal-Sized Hole:
In Chapter 70, Hal confesses to Mario that he has been using marijuana in the pump room, and Pemulis is trying to help him cover it up. Hal uses a metaphor that demonstrates the situational irony of his deepest fear:
Unlock with LitCharts A+It seems different with me, Boo. I feel a hole. It’s going to be a huge hole, in a month. A way more than Hal-sized hole....And the hole’s going to get a little bigger every day until I fly apart in different directions. I’ll fly apart in midair. I’ll fly apart in the Lung, or at Tucson at 200 degrees in front of all these people who knew Himself and think I’m different. Whom I’ve lied to, and liked it. It’ll all come out anyway, clean pee or no.
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Chapter 74
Explanation and Analysis—Into the Annulation-Zone:
Because Wallace uses very close third person narration that gets inside the thoughts of the characters, it becomes increasingly clear throughout the novel that there is no truly reliable narrator. The unreliable narration often creates dramatic irony, such as in Chapter 74, when Joelle tells Steeply about where the Entertainment's Master cartridge might be:
Unlock with LitCharts A+‘I used to go around saying the veil was to disguise lethal perfection...So Jim took a failed piece and told me it was too perfect to release—it’d paralyze people. It was entirely clear that it was an ironic joke. To me.’
...
‘If it got made and nobody’s seen it, the Master, it’s in there with him. Buried...I bet you.’
...
‘ That’s the part of the joke he didn’t know. Where he’s buried is itself buried, now. It’s in your annulation-zone. It’s not even your territory. And now if you want the thing—he’d enjoy the joke very much, I think...’
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