how many wallace-l members read this blog other than you and me?

i've never publicized the url to them, so probably none. but plenty of my readers have read IJ.

I finally just picked up a copy of the book, $8 from a street vendor, great shape, I'm psyched. Definitely getting read this summer. In the meantime, I have nothing constructive to add.

I read it. Does that make me cool?

I don't remember the details of the scene very well though, is it worth reading the analysis?

Nerds! Oh wait, I've read the book as well. How could anyone remeber the details of that book well. It was thick, yo!

I doubt George was going completely from memory, but if you've read the book 2 or 3 times, especially very closely, making margin notes, etc., the details start to sink in. The wraith stuff never did. Maybe it was more boring to me. Maybe I just stopped paying as close attention by that point.

(puffing out my chest) i just re-read it. it was just as amazing the second time around. possibly more.

First, if it's so wonderful how DFW was confronting and transcending meta-fiction and engaging the reader "full-bore", then why would anyone analyze it limply just like any other meta-fiction? Who the hell cares about self-redonkulous tertiary author-reader analogies? The wraith's significance to the book, and its potential impact on a careful reader's consciousness, and even what it meta-means for lit-crit-purposes, is about 1000 times more profound than what Mr. Carr presents, sorry dude. DFW lifted those meta games and puzzles like dead weights and they were pulled to him, not him to them, was kind of one of the points of the book, to me anyway.

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/8175/thesisb.htm

Mr. Hager gets it.

Mostly.