Talent, Precociousness, and Fame Theme Analysis

Infinite Jest is set in a near-future world where contemporary obsessions with competition, celebrity, and success are exaggerated to an at times surreal degree. The culture of the novel is completely fixated on talent, precociousness, and fame, and this is particularly true at the Enfield Tennis Academy—one of the novel’s main settings. The characters chase success and marvel at other people’s talents, yet, in keeping with the novel’s dark mood, talent, precociousness, and fame are shown to have more of a negative than positive effect. They do not lead to happiness and indeed regularly destroy the lives of those who possess them. However, the novel also suggests that it is not possible to eschew the desire for talent and fame entirely. This creates a trap in which talent, precociousness, and fame cause misery—but the lack of these things can cause misery as well.

Infinite Jest’s exploration of this theme centers around the Incandenza family, the Enfield Tennis Academy, and particularly the prodigious E.T.A. student Hal Incandenza. Hal’s precocious talent earns him admiration from others but leaves him feeling isolated and depressed. The novel opens with Hal’s admissions interview for the University of Arizona, a scene that introduces his extraordinary abilities and achievements. Not only is seventeen-year-old Hal ranked the fourth-best player under eighteen years old in the U.S., he is also a highly intelligent autodidact who memorized the dictionary as a child. The admissions interview demonstrates the rewards and opportunities such precocious talent yields; at the same time, Hal’s first-person narration of this episode shows that he feels completely detached from the situation he is in. Rather than feeling excited or nervous about his possible future at college, he obsessively focuses on minute, trivial observations of the people around him. Eventually he tells them: “I cannot make myself understood, now.”

Hal’s statement speaks both to the immediate context of the admissions interview and the broader phenomenon of precocious talent. Hal’s prodigiousness alienates him from others and, in a sense, from himself. He is forced to subscribe to other people’s expectations and desires for his life rather than charting his own course. This isolation leads Hal to abuse marijuana to the point of developing a severe addiction. In a sense, Hal resembles the archetype of a child prodigy gone wrong; burdened by the weight of his own talent, he is unable to find satisfaction and meaning in life.

Hal is not the only character who experiences this problem. The narrator mentions that it is a common phenomenon for prodigious tennis players to crumble under the weight of their own success. One particularly severe example involves a talented junior player who, after a spate of wins, kills himself by drinking cyanide. This triggers a chain of suicides, both accidental and intentional, in which the player’s whole family also dies. Again, this shows how talent and success can have a profoundly negative impact on a person’s life—so negative that they no longer consider life worth living at all. Furthermore, the fact that the player’s family members also kill themselves shows how a person’s family members can be problematically invested in their talent—as is also the case with Hal. This overinvolvement adds even more pressure, heightening the misery of giftedness and success.

The novel also explores the perils of talent, precociousness, and fame through the character of LaMont Chu. A student at E.T.A., LaMont shamefully admits to having “an increasingly crippling obsession with tennis fame.” The narrator notes that LaMont’s “obsession with future-tense-fame makes all else pale.” The use of the phrase “future-tense-fame” here indicates how an obsession with fame and success can severely limit one’s ability to enjoy the present. At the same time, as the weight-room “guru” Lyle points out, “There are feelings associated with fame, but few of them are any more enjoyable than the feelings associated with the envy of fame.” This leads LaMont to conclude that he is trapped: fame and the envy of fame both make people miserable. This pessimistic conclusion reflects the novel’s general orientation to talent, precociousness, and fame.