The Suicidal and the Perversion of Virtues in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest
Naveen John Panicker
Publication: Volume 1 Issue 4
Abstract
The expansion in scientific knowledge and the reformulation of cultural and social boundaries, norms, and perceptions have led to the rethinking of several notions that have governed sociality for centuries; the aspect of suicide, and thereby the conventional response to the suicidal, nevertheless still tend to retain the burnt aftertaste of fear and revulsion that characterised social and cultural perceptions regarding this phenomenon. Suicide is located at the interstices of many areas of thought, all of which have tried to think about and reflect upon this complex phenomenon. Literature is concerned not merely with thinking about suicide but is also concerned, more importantly, with the problem of expressing the seemingly inexpressible, of narrativizing the mute and often misunderstood pain and suffering of the suicidal. This paper would examine David Foster Wallace’s reflections on narrativizing the suicidal in his novel Infinite Jest (1997) and attempt to read it alongside notions of rationality and virtue through a framework borrowed from Thomas Joiner’s The Perversion of Virtue: Understanding Murder-Suicide (2014).
Keywords: Suicide, Depression, David Foster Wallace, Ambivalence, Pain, Virtue, Perversion.
Naveen John Panicker (naveenew007@gmail.com) is an M.Phil. research scholar in the Department of English, University of Delhi. He finished his BA (Hons) from the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, and went on to complete his MA from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi. His areas of interest include Suicidology, Cinema Studies, and Contemporary Literature.