Infinite Jest: Chapter 47 Summary & Analysis

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. In July, Don Gately tells the White Flag meeting that he feels ashamed that he still doesn’t have any sense of a Higher Power. While AA members are allowed to submit to whatever God they choose, Gately wishes someone would just choose for him. He feels embarrassed to be discussing his struggle to connect to God rather than focusing on the day-to-day “miracle” of sobriety. However, after he finishes speaking, people in the audience stand up, clap, and cheer. A biker who introduces himself as Robert F., yet whose jacket reads “Bob Death,” tells Gately that it was good to hear him talk about his difficulties with the God thing.

When AA members talk about how everything gets better through abstinence and recovery, they fail to mention the enormous amount of pain these things involve. The urge to take Substances usually disappears after about six months of sobriety, but it is also at this point that people start “getting in touch” with their most painful feelings and memories. Both Gately’s father and stepfather beat his mother, who was also an alcoholic. As a child, Gately began drinking his mother’s vodka after she passed out so that she wouldn’t drink any more. She developed cirrhosis and attended AA meetings sporadically, relapsing in between.