Infinite Jest: Chapter 72 Summary & Analysis

19 November Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. Marathe and the other A.F.R. members cannot track down Joelle. They decide it won’t be possible to commit a “direct assault” on E.T.A., and thus plan to “intercept” a team of young tennis players traveling to WhataBurger from Quebec and replace them with members of the A.F.R. (those whose legs still function). In the hospital, Gately has a sensual dream about Joelle. He thinks about an elderly woman who lived in his neighborhood as a child called Mrs. Waite, who the other children feared because she resembled a witch. In the end she committed suicide by hanging herself.

Shortly before this, Mrs. Waite had saved up her money to buy Gately a birthday cake, which no one ate and which Gately’s mom threw in the trash. Gately knows that Mrs. Waite could never have known it was not eaten, and yet it is still unbearably sad that this incident happened so soon before her suicide. The dream about Joelle takes place in Mrs. Waite’s kitchen, and Mrs. Waite and Joelle are somehow one figure who is also at the same time “Death incarnate.” This figure explains that Death is female and thus maternal, and that mothers are “so obsessively loving” because they are trying to “make amends” for their role in death.