Two Ways to Draw Infinite Jest's Sierpinski Gasket

Apparently, Infinite Jest is a book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Jest

> Three primary settings, three institutions, and three cults of surrender: discipline (ETA), substance (Ennet), ideology (AFR).

I don't think substance is right: I think it's about freedom from it, or maybe a "higher power" of some sorts, mysticism maybe.

I think it makes more sense, also in the context of what Wallace said elsewhere ("This Is Water"): "Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.(...)"

I enjoyed this article, i still never finished infinite jest as much as id like to. but this idea of burn-in is really interesting as a way to present ideas. I guess ill try again ha

Using the three plots of Infinite Jest as the vertices doesn't really work, there is nothing fractal like about the plot itself and plot is not the structure. How I see it is that the vertices would be family, education, and society, which are all deeply interrelated. For the majority of the characters we learn their relation to these three things, in Hal and Gately we get a very well developed view of it, not so much for Marathe and Steeply where the family and education aspect is abbreviated and I think this is where the mentioned mercy cuts happened.

I don't think I would say Infinite Jest has three plots, it feels like it does because the plot never happens, we get the setup and then it is dropped right when it actually starts. We can view it as three plots but those plots don't provide anything useful towards understanding. They would be more accurately viewed as triangles, they are containers for information.

Edit: I also don't think we can fully interpret Infinite Jest through the Sierpinski structure, that was the structure of the first draft which was something like 500 pages longer and had the bulk of the novel in the end notes. It has been too long since I last read it to say what the structure of the final form of the novel is but I think he may have just made the gasket more linear; he keeps repeating the full triangle but each time he goes a bit deeper with the iterations.

This feels very LLM. It has the shape of sense but doesn't actually make any coherent points, other than "how to draw the Sierpiński triangle". It even has some non-sensical AI diagrams to finish it off.

I wish to read this but I'm on page 600 of my first pass of the book and worry it'll spoil it for me.

At risk of marking myself a "lit-bro" I think the book is proving solidly prophetic.

"David Foster Wallace (DFW) designed Infinite Jest as a Sierpinski Gasket using the classical top-down construction, placing three institutional vertices (ETA, Ennet House, the Wheelchair Assassins) and subdividing the structure at many scales below. Readers, on each reread, fill in the same Gasket using the chaos game, a non-sequential sampling that converges on the Sierpinski Gasket over many iterations. This explains why first readings feel like noise (burn-in), why the entry point doesn't matter, and why the book rewards near-infinite rereading. Although the book is naturally finite, the Gasket built over it by the reader is infinite."