Infinite Jest: Chapter 74 Summary & Analysis

Partial Transcript of Weather-Delayed Meeting Between: (1) Mr. Rodney Tine Sr., Chief of Unspecified Services & White House Adviser on Interdependent Relations; (2) Ms. Maureen Hooley, Vice-President for Children’s Entertainment, Interlace Telentertainment, Inc.; (3) Mr. Carl E. (“Buster”) Yee, Director of Marketing and Product-Perception, Glad Flaccid Receptacle Corporation; (4) Mr. R. Tine Jr., Deputy Regional Coordinator, U.S. Office of Unspecified Services; and (5) Mr. P. Tom Veals, Viney and Veals Advertising, Unltd. 8th Floor State House Annex Boston MA, U.S.A. 20 November — Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. The meeting participants listed in the chapter title discuss a target demographic of white, English-speaking children aged 4-12 who come from middle-to-upper income families. They note that their attention span for advertisements is 13-16 seconds and review their existing efforts to convey a message to these children. The message warns them not to open “unlabeled or suspicious cartridges.” Various methods of presenting the warning have been tested, with many dismissed for being “uncool” or ineffective. They consider showing an evil cartridge-character and then warning viewers that the cartridge is “wicked” and “lying.”

The group also discusses the distribution of a message telling children what to do if they find their parents “sitting in one position in front of the home’s viewer for an unusually long period of time” or otherwise acting strangely “with respect to an entertainment.”

Gately is half asleep again. Joelle is gone, and a nurse comes in and gives Gately a notebook and pen he requested. Gately’s sponsor “Ferocious” Francis is there, and Gately tries to write the word “YO!” on the notebook. However, it comes out as a largely indecipherable scribble. Francis observes that Lenz had been “going around cutting up people’s pets,” and that this is how the fight with the Canadians all began. Gately wants to tell Francis about how he has learned to endure unimaginable pain without narcotics, but he still can’t speak. Francis has misunderstood some of the details about the fight, and believes that the other men involved were Hawaiian, not Canadian.

Gately desperately tries to write a question asking if any of the Canadians were killed, but at this moment his doctor enters the room. The doctor says he’s gone ahead and given Gately a narcotic called Dilaudid, and Gately panics. The doctor says he wants to respect Gately’s preferences but that he himself is Muslim, and if he was in great pain, he knows that God would not mind him taking addictive substances in order to ease his own suffering. Gately tries to draw AA on his notebook and is now desperately gesturing at it. He wants Francis to intervene, but Francis does nothing.

The doctor says that Gately’s pain will get worse and that he wants to give him many further narcotics. The doctor advises Gately to “surrender your courageous fear of dependence and let us do our profession.” Gately knows that if the doctor offers Demerol, he won’t say no—he won’t be able to. He convinces himself that it doesn’t count as a relapse. If it did, Francis would say something. At this point, Francis says he’s going to leave until this “bullshit” is sorted out and return later. The doctor addresses Francis as Mr. Gately Sr. and asks for his input, and Francis says that it’s not his business, and Gately must decide for himself.

In desperation, Gately yanks the doctor’s testicles. The doctor screams. The pain of this gesture is so intense that it knocks Gately out, and when he wakes up a nurse is tending to him. Gately first took Demerol when he was 23 in Salem, MA. Ennet House residents McDade and Diehl come to visit and tell Gately that the gun used to shoot him still hasn’t shown up, and that it is now believed that Lenz ran off with it. However, Lenz may have been spotted blind drunk somewhere near Kenmore Square. They tell Gately general news about Ennet House and then give him a shoplifted and unsigned Get Well Soon card.

Gately suddenly feels hugely sorry for himself and resentful at the AA concept of a loving God. The nurse comes back in and McDade and Diehl leave to give Gately privacy. The nurse tells Gately to turn over, and he feels a wave of humiliation.

Back at E.T.A., Hal suddenly experiences a surge of “unexplained panic.” There is something he enjoys about this feeling because it brings a heightened awareness of one’s surroundings. Yet there is also something horrible about it. He is suddenly overwhelmed by how many mundane, repeated actions he has already completed in life and how many more are to come. He lies down in the Viewing Room (V.R.) and thinks about his family, about E.T.A., and about random facts, such as that no one knows the etymology of the word “blizzard.”

Hal has realized that if forced to choose between tennis and weed, he really doesn’t know which one he would pick. He and James used to have an odd issue around communication; whenever they would speak to each other, James would think that Hal was not speaking, whereas Hal would think that he was. Charles is Avril’s stepbrother. Avril’s father was a binge drinker who would disappear for weeks at a time, and once returned with a new wife—Charles’ mother, who had already given birth to Charles. Charles and Avril’s lack of blood relation has never been discussed, and they have always seemed incredibly close.

As a child, Gately was nicknamed Bim, which stood for Big Indestructible Moron. He had a “jolly ferocity” that tended to frighten away women, but he was never a bully. He was a dedicated football player who first smoked weed at nine and got properly drunk for the first time a few months later. Before getting hooked on narcotics, Gately favored Quaaludes and beer. His alcohol and drug habits did not have a particularly adverse effect on his football playing, partly because he strictly limited his intake during football season. Drugs did have a seriously bad impact on his academic work, however, and this ultimately lost him his place on the football team. Around this time his mother died, and Gately left school forever.

Hal falls asleep in the V.R., and when he wakes up, Pemulis is there, saying they really need to talk. Pemulis asks why there is a strip of human flesh on the window upstairs, and Hal explains about Stice being stuck to the window. Kieran McKenna pops in and mentions that Stice now resembles a piece of pizza with the cheese taken off. Pemulis keeps bringing up the conversation they need to have, but Hal is reluctant to engage. Hal asks Pemulis to retrieve one of James’s cartridges from the shelf and cue it up to the last five minutes. Pemulis does so, and Hal sees exactly what he wanted: the protagonist giving his final, dramatic lecture about death as the meaning of life.

Gately didn’t start burgling straight away; at first he worked in the underworld gambling world with a Dilaudid addict named Facklemann, taking bets, delivering winnings, and collecting debts. He had to warn customers with outstanding debt but rarely used any kind of severe violence. Many of these gamblers were men who bet in a reckless, “suicidal” manner and would tell Gately wretched stories about their own lives in an attempt to elicit sympathy from him. This was Gately’s first exposure to the serious dangers of addiction.

One New Year’s Eve, Gately was making fake IDs for boarding school students when he watched a B.U. football game and unexpectedly began to sob like a child. Eventually, he fell in with two lesbian cocaine addicts who ran a “housecleaning,” key-copying, and burglary business. A new doctor is now in the room, as well as a nurse who Gately finds attractive. The nurse introduced herself as Cathy, but Gately prefers to think of her as “the R.N.” She tells him she will give him a sponge bath later: news that fills him with horror.

Gately suddenly realizes that he hallucinated Joelle’s whole visit and the conversation about her family. Years ago, a severely alcoholic young woman named Pamela Hoffman-Jeep fell in love with Gately simply because he refrained from raping her when he had the chance. The two of them began dating. She was the “single passivest person Gately ever met” and spent almost all of her time lying down and/or unconscious. While they were dating, a man nicknamed Eighties Bill bet $125,000 on a Brown vs. Yale football game. After a series of complex and confused attempts to fix the game as well as an unexpected protest by a “Feminazi” student group from Brown, Bill won $137,000.

Facklemann attempted to scam Eighties Bill and Sorkin, the bookmaker who arranged the bet. Gately and Facklemann would take Dilaudid together, and Gately told himself that he was doing it to help Facklemann out and “keep [him] company.” In the present, Gately feels a tongue licking his forehead, and realizes it is the wraith. Suddenly the wraith disappears. Gately’s fever has intensified, and he dreams that he and a “very sad kid” (presumably Hal) are digging up a head in a graveyard. The head has something extremely important contained inside it. However, once Hal is able to pick it up he nonverbally expresses that it is “Too Late.”

Meanwhile, outside the hospital a “grotesquely huge woman” (Steeply) tells Joelle that she is in terrible danger, but Joelle is not surprised by this information.

Back in Gately’s past, he and Facklemann were binging Dilaudid to the point that they were “flirting with an O.D.” In his extremely high state, the only thing Facklemann could say was “That’s a goddamn lie.” He and Gately laughed until he pissed his pants. The phone rang, followed by the building’s buzzer, but they both ignored it. They eventually ran out of purified water to use for shooting up, so they started to use their own urine. Eventually they heard Pamela’s voice on the intercom, drunkenly asking to be let in. Gately passed out.  

Joelle responds to questions (presumably posed by Hugh/Helen Steeply) about the Entertainment. She describes the only two scenes in which she appears, both of which are very simple. She also explains some of the visual techniques James used in making the film, including techniques to recreate the effect of a baby’s vision. She explains that James stayed true to his vow of sobriety, but that he couldn’t handle it and that this is what killed him. Joelle thinks it’s likely that James never actually finished a Master copy of the Entertainment; she adds that if a finished copy does exist, it’s probably buried with him.

The narrative switches back to Hal’s first-person perspective. Kyle Coyle and Mario are watching an early film by James called Accomplice!. They discuss the incident of Ortho Stice’s face getting stuck to the window and having to be ripped off. Mario then says that Stice’s bed was found bolted to the ceiling in the middle of the night. Coyle explains that Stice thinks he is being haunted by a ghost who wants to teach him about “ordinary objects” and “raise his game to like a supernatural level.” Stice has come to believe that he can move objects with his mind, while the other students are disturbed by his apparent mental breakdown.

Cosgrove Watt was one of the only professional actors James cast in his films. He appears in Accomplice!, a film about a sadomasochistic sexual encounter between a “sad and beautiful” young male sex worker and a creepy older man. While they have sex, the older man positions a blade such that it cuts into his penis. This eventually kills him, leading the younger man to repeat over and over: “Murderer!” Outside, a snowstorm rages, triggered by the combination of wind from Mexico and the Arctic mingling above the Great Concavity.

Hal recalls when James’s obsession with making films began, shortly after E.T.A. was founded. Avril assumed it was just a phase, and Hal wonders if part of the reason why this “phase” lasted until James’s death was because James never really achieved success in filmmaking. Like his father, Hal “had moved serially between obsessions” when he was a child. He remembers walking past a church in their old neighborhood in Weston that displayed a sign reading: “Life is like tennis / those who serve / best usually win.”

After James’s funeral, Avril spent more and more time locked up inside the Headmaster’s House. This has accelerated the rate at which she has visually aged. Hal suddenly realizes that he doesn’t want to play tennis that afternoon. He considers purposefully hurting himself by falling from a height onto his bad ankle, which would mean that people would treat him with “compassionate sorrow rather than disappointed sorrow.” Hal remembers a time when Orin and a group of other E.T.A. students organized a clandestine viewing of some porn cartridges, only to be ratted out by a female student. When James confronted Orin about the plan, Orin immediately “confessed everything.”

James told Orin that he wouldn’t ban him from watching hardcore porn, but that he would rather he didn’t because he was afraid it would give Orin “the wrong idea about having sex.” James would prefer for Orin to discover sex with someone he loved. Orin was shocked and moved that his father falsely assumed he was still a virgin. Hal thinks that this conversation is the most “open” James ever was with someone, and he is annoyed that it was “wasted” on Orin. Of all the brothers, Mario had spent the most time around James when he was still alive, and Orin doesn’t know how open their conversations were.

Orin thinks that James was still a virgin in his late 30s, when he and Avril met, and also that James’s fixation with Joelle was totally non-sexual. Hal suddenly has a “lucid vision” of Avril having sex with John Wayne. He is aware of their ongoing sexual relationship, which began shortly after Wayne arrived at E.T.A., and doesn’t know how he feels about it.

Joelle plans to ask Pat to put her in quarantine with Clenette and Yolanda in order to protect herself from the A.F.R. A man named Mikey speaks to an AA meeting, telling a story about when he behaved rudely to his sister, prayed about it, and then returned to apologize. Meanwhile, the Assistant District Attorney for Suffolk County’s 4th Circuit is talking with Pat Montesian. The A.D.A. attends Phob-Comp-Anon, a program for people who attach themselves to those suffering from severe phobias, compulsions, or both. As part of his Phob-Comp-Anon program, the A.D.A. needs to make amends with Gately, but he has been having a very difficult time bringing himself to do so.