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Paradox
Definition of Parody
A parody is a work that mimics the style of another work, artist, or genre in an exaggerated way, usually for comic effect. Parodies can take many forms, including fiction... read full definition
A parody is a work that mimics the style of another work, artist, or genre in an exaggerated way, usually for comic effect. Parodies can... read full definition
A parody is a work that mimics the style of another work, artist, or genre in an exaggerated way, usually... read full definition
Parody
Explanation and Analysis—Hamlet:
Infinite Jest can be read as a loose allegory of Shakespeare's Hamlet, sometimes veering into parody. Hamlet, like Infinite Jest, is a high-stakes family tragedy. The play revolves around Prince Hamlet of Denmark, who begins seeing his father's ghost. Hamlet's uncle Claudius, who has married Hamlet's newly-widowed mother, Gertrude, callously insists that Hamlet needs to get over his father's death. Hamlet becomes convinced that Claudius murdered his father. He spends the play trying to prove Claudius guilty and get revenge. Along the way, many people are hurt or killed. Among the dead is Hamlet's beloved Ophelia, who dies by suicide after Hamlet kills her own father.
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Chapter 10
Explanation and Analysis—Revenge Tragedy:
Chapter 10 tells the story of how Don Gately ends up at Ennet House after he is linked to the death of Guillaume DuPlessis, an operative from Québec. This backstory foreshadows a major revenge plot that never fully comes to fruition, ultimately parodying revenge tragedies like Shakespeare's Hamlet:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Don Gately... had, of course, a special place in the heart of a remorseless Revere A.D.A. with judicial clout throughout Boston’s three counties and beyond, an of course particularly remorseless A.D.A., as of late, whose wife now needed Valium even just to floss, and was patiently awaiting his chance, the A.D.A. was, coldly biding his time, being a patient Get-Even and Cold-Dish man just like Don Gately, who was, through no will to energy-consuming violence on his part, in the sort of a hell of a deep-shit mess that can turn a man’s life right around.
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Chapter 18
Explanation and Analysis—E Unibus Pluram:
In Chapter 18, Hal and a group of other students discuss the competitive, grueling nature of their tennis training at E.T.A. When Hal emphasizes all of their "aloneness," Ingersoll responds with a parody of an idiom:
Unlock with LitCharts A+‘We’re all on each other’s food chain. All of us. It’s an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of individual. We’re each deeply alone here. It’s what we all have in common, this aloneness.’
‘E Unibus Pluram,’ Ingersoll muses.
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Chapter 42
Explanation and Analysis—Eschaton:
In Chapter 42, an allusion to a 17th-century Christian allegory helps emphasize that the game of Eschaton is a parody of Christian doctrine about the end of the world:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Eschaton takes eight to twelve people to play, w/ 400 tennis balls so dead and bald they can’t even be used for service drills anymore...The vademecumish rulebook that Pemulis in Y.P.W. got Hal Incandenza to write...is about as long and interesting as J. Bunyan’s stupefying Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come, and a pretty tough nut to compress into anything lively (although every year a dozen more E.T.A. kids memorize the thing at such a fanatical depth that they sometimes report reciting mumbled passages under light dental or cosmetic anesthesia, years later).
Related Themes:
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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