This is an attempt to explain everything left unclear in Infinite Jest based on a lot of theories I've read online and my own thoughts about what happens. Only read if you've finished the book, unless you want to get spoiled.
[Counter-arguments/reasoning/additional explanatory information is contained in brackets and sometimes line dividers if there's multiple paragraphs, but this page is already really long, so these sections are the more skippable stuff if you don't want to read everything.]
The master copy was originally buried with JOI (James Orin Incandenza, aka Himself/Hal's dad), but then removed before Hal, Gately, and John Wayne go to dig it up, most likely by the USOUS (U.S. Office of Unspecified Services) or the AFR (wheelchair assassins) after where the text left off in Nov YDAU.
For evidence of the master copy being in JOI's grave, in a footnote it's stated that JOI's specific orders were to have the master copy of Infinite Jest (V) buried with him:
"… James had been driving to this very brownstone, to shoot Joelle in the weird wobble-lensed maternal 'I'm-so-terribly-sorry' monologue-scene of the last thing he'd done, and then never shown her, and had ordered the cartridge's burial in the brass casket w/ him in the same testament in which he'd willed Joelle an absurd (and addiction-enabling) annuity …" (Ft. 80, p. 999).
In another footnote, it's confirmed that there were master cartridges buried with him, most likely containing the master copy of Infinite Jest, given how he specifically willed it to be buried with him in the previous quote:
"Certain other and doubtless really disturbing footage of Clipperton's suicide still exists, having — with perhaps half a dozen other emotionally or professionally sensitive cartridge-Masters — been designated Unviewable by testatory codicil and, as far as either Hal or Orin knows, enclosed in some sort of vault-apparatus that only Himself's attorneys and maybe Avril have access to. As far as can be determined, only those lawyers, Avril, Disney Leith, and perhaps Mario know that the cartridges were, in fact, along with his case of special lenses, interred right there with J. O. Incandenza's dead body …" (Ft. 160, p. 1030).
[Although, someone from those listed above could have removed the master copy pre/post-burial. This seems unlikely since in order to have the motivation to do so, they would have to have known what its effects were, which would require JOI having informed them in some way that the film was lethal and them believing him straightforwardly without attempting to view the film, or watching the film themselves and somehow not dying. Also, this footnote contradicts the commonly accepted theory that Orin digs up the master copy from JOI's grave, since it states that both Orin & Hal believed JOI's master cartridges were enclosed in a vault instead of buried with him.]
Regarding the copies of the Entertainment that have already been found, in the footnote about JOI's filmography, the description of Infinite Jest (V) has on record that copies were distributed according to JOI's will:
"Though Canadian archivist Tête-Bêche lists the film as completed and privately distributed by P.Y.E.U. through posthumous provisions in the filmmaker's will, all other comprehensive filmographies have the film either unfinished or UNRELEASED, its Master cartridge either destroyed or vaulted sui testator." (Ft. 24, p. 993).
[There are no other references to this "Tête-Bêche" person, so it doesn't seem like there's a motivation for this character to have just made this up. "Tête-Bêche" is also just a word that refers to a pair of stamps printed with one stamp inverted (or "Head to tail" in French using google translate), which if anything seems to be a metaphorical implication about the scenes in Infinite Jest the film, is my interpretation.]
This implies that JOI himself wanted the cartridges distributed and had made copies in preparation for his death (because they couldn't have been made after his death if he had wanted the master copy to be buried with him). It is unclear how P.Y.E.U. (Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited), JOI's independent production company, was run ("… his production company was privately owned and underwent at least four different changes of corporate name," Ft. 24, p. 985), though there is one example of JOI's will being carried out that could imply that his lawyers handled distribution:
"… when a gaily wrapped package forwarded from the offices of Incandenza's attorney revealed that Himself had designed and built and legally willed (in a codicil) to be gaily wrapped and forwarded for Mario's thirteenth Xmas a trusty old Bolex H64 Rex 5 tri-lensed camera …" (315).
So supposedly according to JOI's will, the copies were distributed to everyone who does end up receiving them: the medical attache and the film critics et al., the motivation being revenge against those who had an affair with his wife or had criticized his filmography, since he knew the film was fatal according to Joelle:
"Was the allegedly fatally entertaining and scopophiliac thing Jim alleges he made out of her unveiled face here at the start of Y.T.S.D.B. a cage or really a door? Had he even cut the tape into something coherent? There was nothing coherent in the mother-death-cosmology and apologies she'd repeated over and over, inclined over that auto-wobbled lens propped up in the plaid-sided pram. He never let her see it, not even the dailies. He killed himself less than ninety days later … Did she kill him, somehow, just inclining veilless over that lens?" (230-231).
[Though Joelle does claim that this was a joke when interviewed by Steeply:
"'When he talked about this thing as a quote perfect entertainment, terminally compelling — it was always ironic … So Jim took a failed piece and told me it was too perfect to release — it'd paralyze people. It was entirely clear that it was an ironic joke. To me.'" (940).
However, whenever she thinks about the film from her own perspective, she is doubtful of the effects but questions the nature of the film enough that it seems like she considered JOI to be at least somewhat serious about his claims of it being fatally entertaining, as in the previously mentioned quote from pp. 230-231. Here's another example of her perspective on what JOI said about the film, which doesn't seem to be taken as just a joke:
"… the prodigious punter's father, infinite jester, director of a final opus so magnum he'd claimed to have had it locked away. Joelle's never seen the completed assembly of what she'd appeared in, or seen anyone who's seen it, and doubts that any sum of scenes as pathologic as he'd stuck that long quartzy auto-wobbling lens on the camera and filmed her for could have been as entertaining as he'd said the thing he'd always wanted to make had broken his heart by ending up." (228).
The fact that Joelle's skeptical at all and not just outright dismissive seems like she didn't think he was just joking. But Joelle's reaction also brings up another issue with theories that someone else was sending the films, that even if JOI truly believed the film was fatal and told other people about it, they wouldn't have believed him. This is why the particular theory that Orin dug up the master copy from JOI's grave and was the one masterminding the distributions is hard to believe in my opinion; he would have had to have an extreme faith in something that sounds unbelievable in order to go through with such drastic actions all without viewing the film himself - and he already thought his dad was crazy ("the Mad Stork").]
So the most straightforward answer is that JOI's lawyers are sending out the copies according to his will (but there are still other possibilities such as Orin being the one to actually receive and distribute them - I'll address this in another section to avoid another long digression, see Q2) while the master copy stays buried with JOI. But then how does the master copy disappear by the time Hal and Gately go to dig it up?
The most likely reason is that the USOUS (Steeply) or the AFR (Marathe) get to it before them. To me, all signs indicate that the USOUS is in the best position to find the master copy first; by the end of the book they have all the information they need, as we can see in the interviews that the USOUS conducts.
In Steeply's interview with Joelle, she tells him that she believes the master cartridge is buried with JOI:
"'They were buried with him. The Masters of everything unreleased. At least that was in his will.' … 'If it got made and nobody's seen it, the Master, it's in there with him. Buried. That's just a guess. But I bet you.' … 'That's the part of the joke he didn't know. Where he's buried is itself buried, now. It's in your annulation-zone. It's not even your territory. And now if you want the thing — he'd enjoy the joke very much, I think. Oh shit yes very much.'" (940-941).
Joelle makes it seem like it's a mysterious and unknowable thing where JOI is buried, but the USOUS had already acquired that information from previous interviews:
During Orin's interview, it seems like in the middle of Orin trying to tell the mold story, Steeply asks a completely non sequitur question about where his dad is buried, because Orin directly tells him:
"'In the Moms's family plot. St.-Quelquechose Quebec or something. Never been there. His will said only not anywhere near his own dad's plot. Right near Maine. Heart of the Concavity. The Moms's home town's wiped off the map. Bad ecocycles, real machete-country. I'd have to try to recall the town …" (Ft. 234, p. 1041).
Orin doesn't give the exact details of the location, but in Rodney Tine Jr.'s (the USOUS leader's son) interview with Molly Notkin, she tells him the real location of the funeral:
"That the Auteur's funeral had purportedly taken place in the L'Islet Province of Nouveau Quebec, the birth-province of the Auteur's widow, featuring an interment and not a cremation." (789-790).
[For all people say about the reliability of Molly Notkin's interview, this is a really specific detail to remember and actually accurate, as corroborated by other quotes in the book:
Early on, from the narrator: "Incandenza's burial in Quebec's L'Islet County was twice delayed by annular hyperfloration cycles." (65).
In a footnote, when referring to his dead body: "(in the Mondragon-family-plot area of Le Cimetière du St. Adalbert in the now over-lush potato-growing country off Provincial Autoroute 204 in L'Islet Province, Quebec, just over the border from what is now the eastern Concavity, such that the funeral had to be delayed and then rushed to be fit in between annulation-cycles)" (Ft. 160a, p. 1030).
From Hal's perspective: "The Moms had had Himself interred in her family's traditional plot in L'Islet Province … The funeral had been held on 5 or 6 April in St. Adalbert, a small town built around spud-storage facilities fewer than five clicks west of the Great Concavity." (907, 910).]
It's not that difficult to imagine that the USOUS could deduce the exact location of JOI's grave by looking up records of Avril's family plot in L'Islet Province, Quebec. However, the AFR could beat them there if they figure out the same information in time, which is very likely given their position at the end of the novel.
Since the AFR was aware that the Entertainment was buried ("Where Is The Master Buried" (p. 972) from Orin's technical interview), they most likely received this information from Luria being informed about Joelle's interview by the USOUS's Rodney Tine (see Q13 for more info on their connection), which would mean they probably have access to any other info the USOUS acquires. Other than that, they would be able to figure out where JOI was buried from any of the Incandenzas in their invasion of ETA or from Orin if he remembers the funeral location.
It's also possible that the USOUS would fail to take immediate action because of legal limitations; for example, being prevented from accessing the gravesite due to it being in Quebec and out of USOUS jurisdiction. Also, it sounds like the USOUS were more limited by formalities compared to the AFR; from Marathe's perspective: "But Steeply, before committing to overt action, will wish for confirmation that those in the cabinet were items of the true Entertainment" (751).
[There is also the possibility that since the grave is in the annulation-zone (toxic waste dump Concavity/Convexity), nobody would be allowed to access it until the annulation-cycles died down. Then, you can almost imagine a movie-type scenario where all of the different groups have figured out where it is and are like rushing to get to JOI's grave to dig up the cartridge as soon as the annulation-cycle is clear, which would then account for the scene of Hal & Gately desperately trying to dig up his grave with like continental importance on the line. That would be funny. But I can't help but look back at the previous quotes about JOI's funeral and note the fact that it was delayed twice by annulation cycles and still held on April 5/6, a few days after he died on April 1, so there doesn't seem to be enough time for all of this to happen at once, especially how Hal, Gately, and John Wayne are able to come together that fast seeing as they're barely/not familiar with each other - though this may account for them not finding the cartridge due to them being there too late.]
Though it is possible for the AFR to get there first, the fact that John Wayne is present during Hal & Gately digging up JOI's head seems like an indication that the AFR fails to acquire the master copy. Presumably, John Wayne is an AFR spy (see Q7 for evidence), so him being there implies that he's under their orders and being informed by them (whether or not he's double-crossing them). If the AFR already had the master copy, then it seems like he would have known the trip would be futile and not have gone to JOI's grave. Unless John Wayne knew that the AFR was searching for it at that moment and was betraying them by going with Hal & Gately to try to beat them to it, which then would imply that the AFR reaches it before them.
With all that in mind, it's unclear whether the USOUS or the AFR would find the master copy first, but it's most likely one of them vs. anyone else. There's also the less likely possibility of someone who was aware of the cartridge's effects & burial independently removing it sometime earlier (if anyone, I would guess Avril since her motivations are so unclear), but theorizing about this would just be based on pure speculation (see Q8 for speculation).
As explained in Q1, JOI most likely made copies of the Entertainment before his death and had them sent out through a provision in his will. This could have been done by JOI's lawyers, though there is still the possibility of one of JOI's family members actually mailing the cartridges/carrying out his will themselves.
It would be remiss not to consider Orin's involvement, since there is a good amount of circumstantial evidence that links him to the copies. For instance, there were two copies of the Entertainment found in New Iberia LA and Tempe AZ (see Q13 for locations of all the copies), both locations nearby Orin's previous & current residence.
[Orin previously lived in Louisiana (LA), when he played for the New Orleans Saints before he moved to Phoenix (AZ) when he was transferred to the Arizona Cardinals:
"The condo's whole bathroom is done in this kind of minty yellow tile he didn't choose, maybe chosen by the free safety who lived here before the Cardinals sent New Orleans the free safety, two reserve guards and cash for Orin Incandenza, punter." (44).
This transfer occurred last summer around July after incidents with roaches and dead bodies scared him off from his house in Chalmette LA to move to Phoenix AZ:
"… parents'd come in in the ghastly A.M.-tenement light and find their infants blind, like a dozen blinded infants that last summer; and it was during this spate or nightmarish outbreak, plus July flooding that sent over a dozen nightmarish dead bodies from a hilltop graveyard sliding all gray-blue down the incline Orin and two teammates had their townhouse on, in suburban Chalmette, shedding limbs and innards all the way down the hillside's mud and one even one morning coming to rest against the post of their roadside mailbox, when Orin came out for the morning paper, that Orin had had his agent put out the trade feelers. And so to the glass canyons and merciless light of metro Phoenix, in a kind of desiccated circle, near the Tucson of his own father's desiccated youth." (45-46).
Assuming that last summer/July means that he moved during the summer of YDPAH (previous year from YDAU), this falls in line with the timeline of when the copies were sent out, since they started showing up in the summer of YDPAH (see Q13 for evidence), which means if Orin was the one sending out the copies, he could have sent the New Iberia LA one while he was still living in Louisiana and then the Tempe AZ one once he moved to Phoenix AZ.]
Since Orin's current residence was Phoenix, if he had mailed the tapes directly from the post office, it would make sense that the tape that the medical attache received had a postmark (which indicates where/when a letter is received by a postal service) from Phoenix and no return address:
"The padded mailer is postmarked suburban Phoenix area in Arizona U.S.A., and the return address box has only the term 'HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!,' with a small drawn crude face, smiling, in ballpoint ink, instead of a return address or incorporated logo." (36).
Orin also admits to going to a post office sometime recent, which Hal finds strange of him:
"'… Take the other day. I strike up a conversation with a certain Subject in line in the post office. I notice a guy in a wheelchair behind us. No big deal. Are you listening?'
'What are you doing going to the post office? You hate snail-mail. And you quit mailing the Moms the pseudo-form-replies two years ago, Mario says.'" (244).
[Though earlier in a chapter from Orin's POV, he references mailing a toy to a "Subject's kid":
"Their last morning together, right before he'd mailed her child an expensive toy and then had his phone number changed, he'd awakened from a night of horror-show dreams … wishing the Subject would put her own clothes and sharp jewelry on and take the rest of her Töblerone out of the freezer and go, so he could go to the bathroom and get yesterday's asphyxiated roaches into an E.W.D. dumpster before the dumpsters all filled for the day, and decide what kind of expensive present to mail the Subject's kid." (47-48).
I think this can be taken at face value, disregarding the possibility of the expensive toy being a copy of the Entertainment (since the only copy found in Arizona was at a film festival, see Q13). So potentially him going to a post office can be explained as related to his obsession with Subjects. It's true that all of the evidence pointing to Orin is circumstantial, so everything that lines up could just be red herrings to make him seem suspicious without him even doing anything, similar to how the AFR & USOUS suspect and stalk him to his apparent cluelessness of any wrongdoing.
Though it is hard to overlook the postmark from Phoenix on the medical attache's tape, since Orin is the only character related to JOI in some way that is known to have anything to do with that city, and especially since the medical attache lived in Boston, which considering that nearly everyone related in some way to JOI, probably even his lawyers, are all congregated in Boston, why wouldn't they just send it from there, if it was anyone else sending the tapes. The only reason I can think of is the possibility of JOI establishing his production company in Arizona, since he was from Tucson AZ and shot some of his films there (e.g. The Night Wears a Sombrero (p. 704), Widower (Ft. 24, p. 987)), in which case his production company or lawyers would be sending them out from there, though this is just a theory without evidence.]
Outside of Orin's own actions, the AFR's suspicions of him are another reason to believe that Orin is the one sending out the tapes:
"M. Fortier was required to absent himself for a period, in the search's middle, to help facilitate Southwest ops, the infiltration of that relative of the auteur felt most strongly (according to Marathe) to have knowledge or possession of a duplicable copy. There was reason to think M. DuPlessis had received his original copies from this relative, an athlete. Marathe felt U.S.B.S.S. felt this person may have borne responsibility for the razzles and dazzles of Berkeley and Boston, U.S.A. The Americans' field-operative, jutting with prostheses, had been clinging to this person like a bad odor." (723).
However this quote makes it clear that this suspicion is just Marathe's belief, which seems largely informed by the USOUS's interest in him. Marathe refers to a reason to believe that DuPlessis's copy was from Orin, but the following sentence implies that that reason is the USOUS's belief in his guilt. [Also, the AFR having some secret info from DuPlessis that points to Orin's guilt is somewhat doubtful since they didn't have much information on the DuPlessis copy in the first place, as they had to figure out for themselves if it was the master copy or not.]
We know that the USOUS's interest in Orin is less substantive than the AFR's suspicions, since they disregard him after Steeply's interview to focus on ETA instead and believe that the copies were from the northern border of the U.S., from Rodney Tine's perspective:
"Attempts to trace the matrix of the samizdat without viewing it — from induction on postal codes, e-micros-copies on the brown padded mailers, immolation and chromatography on the unlabelled cartridge-cases, extensive and maddening interviews of those civilians exposed — place the likely dissemination-point someplace along the U.S. north border, with routing hubs in metro Boston/New Bedford and/or somewhere in the desert Southwest." (549).
[My interpretation of the USOUS's conclusions: If immolation & chromatography on the cartridge-cases were the reasons why they suspect the dissemination-point to be along the U.S. north border (which due to Reconfiguration would include Boston MA), then this could be explained by JOI making the physical copies and packaging them in Boston. Then the "routing hub" locations that they cite could be areas where JOI's production company or lawyers are located and are sending out the copies, though this could also just be Orin himself sending them out from these locations, since he lives in the desert Southwest and often has to travel as a pro-football player, likely visiting MA at some point.]
The thing that's hard to believe about Orin sending out the tapes is that he seems completely unaware of anything he could have done to cause people to follow him even though he often questions why he is being followed and forms his own theories. From his perspective, it's clear that he believes Hal's theory that the men in wheelchairs are just shy fans of his when he is surveyed by the AFR leader:
"Orin was waiting for the ruse involving the pen that'd get him to sign something so the very shy fan club'd get their autograph." (598-599).
He seems entirely confused about the attention from the AFR, though he questions their intentions and tries to figure it out without any apparent contemplation of his own blame:
"It was strange upon strange; it was almost as if the legless and pathologically shy punting-groupies were somehow afraid of Moment's Junoesque Ms. Steeply — Orin had seen his last wheelchair the day before she came up, and now (he realized, driving) it was only hours after she'd left that they were now back, with their shy ruses." (574).
He also finds their request to know where the master is buried completely incomprehensible when he is captured, which seems unrealistic if he had anything to do with sending out the copies (but to be fair, they did phrase it in a confusing and unhelpful way):
"The stilted amplified voice that came periodically through the small screen or vent above him, demanding to know Where Is The Master Buried, was surreal and bizarre and inexplicable enough to Orin to make him grateful: it was the sort of surreal disorienting nightmarish incomprehensible but vehement demand that often gets made in really bad dreams." (972).
Also, considering his interviews with Steeply, the fact that he is driven to ask Hal so many in depth questions about Separatism after those interviews seems more like he was grilled by Steeply about his connections and was then trying to figure out why he was asked about those things through Hal's help, rather than it necessarily just being about him trying to impress Steeply. At one point he even asks Hal about JOI's connection to the word samizdat (after Hal defines it for him), which would seem excessively disingenuous if he did know about the tapes, and more supports him being sincere in his confusion when asked about those topics:
"'So you'd have no idea why The Mad Stork's name would come up in connection with somebody saying samizdat.'" (Ft. 110, p. 1011).
Considering his lack of awareness, one explanation that makes sense with him being the one to send out the tapes is if he was given instructions to carry out JOI's will on when/where to send the copies, which he carried out without any real interest or idea that it was significant in any way, as in like a chore he had to fulfill. Then when followed/questioned by Steeply/the AFR he wouldn't even comprehend that he did something wrong because he wouldn't have followed up on what happened with the tapes.
Though there is one line in Orin's perspective, right before he is surveyed by the man in the wheelchair (Fortier), that seems strangely suspicious:
"Orin checked the door's fish-eye peeper, saw only the hallway's claret-colored wall opposite, and opened the door with a smile he felt all the way down to his bare soles. Swiss cuckolds, furtive near-Eastern medical attaches, zaftig print-journalists: he felt ready for anything." (597).
The fact that he considers the medical attache as a possibility of being at the door could just be a related passing thought (initially I had read it as a somewhat oedipal connection to a previous Subject perhaps, considering that the other examples all had to do with "Subjects" – some idea about how he tries to steal a Subject away from the same type of person that his mother would have affairs with, as in the psychology thing of trying to replicate and master the trauma of his mother's affairs), but if he was actually anticipating the same medical attache that died earlier that year to be looking for him, then this could have further implications about his role in sending out the tapes.
This could indicate that Orin was intentionally sending the copies without a full understanding of what would happen, since he expects the medical attache to still be alive and potentially looking for him. Based on the other types of people considered along with the medical attache, it seems like Orin's assumption is that the medical attache would have a disagreeable reason for seeking him out, which would make sense if he had sent a copy of the Entertainment to the medical attache with an understanding that it would have a negative effect on him.
Though it is confusing how he could be sending the tapes out without knowing the full extent of what would happen. I would still assume JOI had willed him copies of the tapes or he had somehow inherited them (maybe given to him or asked for by him because Joelle had starred in them), but perhaps JOI had left a note or some kind of message warning Orin or anyone else what would happen if anyone watched it, or Joelle and Orin could have talked about the film and how JOI had told Joelle that he believed it was fatally entertaining. Then based on Orin assuming the medical attache would still be alive, he doubted the Entertainment's effects like Joelle did, maybe even dismissed it outright and thought his dad was crazy. Maybe he assumed it was just a really shitty film (maybe he would've even known what the scenes were about through Joelle) and then sent it out as a prank, trying to do something similar to JOI's Found Drama scheme or his other film "The Joke" and carry on his dad's legacy by making his dad's old enemies sit through what he thought was a bad film (especially since he brings up both of those "films" to Steeply and thinks they're funny (Ft. 145, p. 1027)). Maybe the "Happy Anniversary" on the medical attache's copy wasn't relevant to any significant date but just written because it was sent as an April Fool's Day prank and it wasn't really his anniversary. [Unfortunately for the medical attache, the prank–or one might call it a jest–was infinite (kill me).] It makes sense that if he was doing it as a prank, he would've wanted to hide his identity and address, but wouldn't have bothered to hide the location he sent it from (I'd assume more discretion if he was actually trying to kill someone).
It's hard to believe he was doing all that and didn't try to watch the film at any point, but I'll theorize some reasons: maybe he already knew what the film was about (Hal seemed to think so: "I'm sure you know way more about whatever it was they were trying to make. Joelle and Himself" (p. 249)) so he didn't feel the need to watch it (or perhaps he specifically didn't want to see it because he knew Joelle unveiled in it & the actual cause of their breakup was due to him having some unnerving-type reaction to her face after her disfigurement), or he was refraining from watching it to give himself plausible deniability, as in if he ever got accused of sending out the film for mean-spirited reasons, then he could dismiss those claims by saying he never saw it and had no idea it was that bad or something to that effect.
Initially I had thought it was more likely that JOI's lawyers/production company would have sent out the tapes from the "privately distributed by P.Y.E.U. through posthumous provisions in the filmmaker's will" line (Ft. 24, p. 993), but it could have been that the private distribution was just JOI sending the rest of the copies to Orin. He could have received all the copies right after JOI's death and had them lying around for two years until he had his bright idea of what to do with them, then started sending them out when he had time, which makes more sense for how they've kind of randomly appeared. Though if JOI did want the copies to go to Orin, it kind of disturbingly implies that JOI considered Orin disposable enough to risk him viewing the film and dying.
Ultimately it's most likely either JOI sending the copies out posthumously through other people (his lawyers/production company or Orin) with the motive of getting revenge on his enemies, or Orin sending out the tapes himself to get one over on his father's old enemies without fully realizing that they'd die from the film. [Honestly, going into this question I didn't think it was Orin because it seemed out of character for him to be premeditatively murdering people, but after typing all that up, there is a scenario with him being the one to send them out without murderous intent, which makes enough sense to me that I'm more leaning towards believing it's him.]
They are trying to find the master copy of the Entertainment before anyone else gets it, but the circumstances behind how this occurs are probably the most unexplainable parts about what supposedly comes after the main text, though I will try to guess what leads to this.
Just in case this plot point is unfamiliar, it's from the vision/dream Gately has when he is delirious from pain in the hospital, which it's not stated but clearly meant to be Hal and Gately digging up JOI's head:
"He dreams he's with a very sad kid and they're in a graveyard digging some dead guy's head up and it's really important, like Continental-Emergency important, and Gately's the best digger but he's wicked hungry, like irresistibly hungry, and he's eating with both hands out of huge economy-size bags of corporate snacks so he can't really dig, while it gets later and later and the sad kid is trying to scream at Gately that the important thing was buried in the guy's head and to divert the Continental Emergency to start digging the guy's head up before it's too late, but the kid moves his mouth but nothing comes out, and Joelle van D. appears with wings and no underwear and asks if they knew him, the dead guy with the head, and Gately starts talking about knowing him even though deep down he feels panic because he's got no idea who they're talking about, while the sad kid holds something terrible up by the hair and makes the face of somebody shouting in panic: Too Late." (934).
Though this is presented as a vision/dream, the actuality of this happening is corroborated in Hal's perspective from one year later (in the Year of Glad, 1st chapter of the book):
"I think of John N. R. Wayne, who would have won this year's WhataBurger, standing watch in a mask as Donald Gately and I dig up my father's head." (16-17).
So apparently Gately's vision does happen, but then how do we know which parts are real? The appearance of Joelle in Gately's vision sounds like an interference from Gately's state of mind since it has a similar dream element quality as Gately's previous Joelle dreams and is not mentioned by Hal. Gately also doesn't mention John Wayne, though this seems realistic if Gately didn't know him that well and if Wayne was only standing watch/not participating in digging. The vision seems to operate on dream logic, as in it's not all that clear to Gately why he's there (though if he did end up there in reality he would most likely know why) and certain types of dream-contrived anxieties begin to intrude (e.g. too hungry to do anything, panic about appearing dumb in front of Joelle), so the vision seems mostly unreliable. Whether or not they found the master copy of the Entertainment, all we know for sure is that Hal and Gately dug up JOI's head while John Wayne was there (though the vision does seem like a clear indication that they do not find the Entertainment).
What's also strange about this happening is why they were going for JOI's head in the first place. We assume that they're trying to find the master copy of the Entertainment, but nowhere in the text does anyone say that the Entertainment was put in JOI's head, except for perhaps JOI himself in his "Professional Conversationalist" conversation with Hal:
"'That your quote-unquote "complimentary" Dunlop widebody tennis racquets' super-secret-formulaic composition materials of high-modulus-graphite-reinforced polycarbonate polybutylene resin are organochemically identical I say again identical to the gyroscopic balance sensor and mise-en-scène appropriation card and priapistic-entertainment cartridge implanted in your very own towering father's anaplastic cerebrum after his cruel series of detoxifications and convolution-smoothings and gastrectomy and prostatectomy and pancreatectomy and phalluctomy…'" (30-31).
[I've seen some theories where people believe this quote means that JOI had the Entertainment tape surgically implanted in his head so that it gets destroyed when his head is microwaved. I just don't think that's physically possible. My interpretation of the word choice here: detoxifications = his sobriety near the end of his life; words that relate to the removal of bodily organs = referring to the state of his dead body; so I believe he's saying that after he gets sober and dies, the cartridge is implanted in his head.
Since this conversation occurs on April 1 YTMP, exactly one year before he killed himself (on April 1 YT-SDB), and the Entertainment hadn't been made yet (it was produced/completed in the last few months of his life), if he's referring to the lethal Entertainment cartridge then he's predicting the future or spelling out exactly what he plans to do – which is to have the Entertainment placed in his head after his death. I think there's aspects of both things going on; for one, if the cartridge was placed in his head, he had to have put that in his will because no sane person would have chosen to place it there, but also there seems to be something supernatural going on with JOI, which is perceived as madness though his delusions accurately correlate with the events that happen later in the novel, as in he predicts Hal becoming mute/unable to communicate and in this specific quote where (if it is what he's talking about) he is aware of the eventual existence of the Entertainment.]
But even if JOI is trying to inform Hal that the Entertainment cartridge would be placed in his head here, Hal almost certainly would not have believed him or even remembered this conversation. I think the most likely scenario is that Hal finds out about JOI ordering the cartridge to be placed in his head through viewing JOI's will or being informed by someone who knows about the cartridge being placed in his head (maybe even through Gately from remembering his dream, though this seems like a causal loop paradox unless the dream was a construction from JOI), or the cartridge isn't in his head at all, maybe just placed somewhere in the coffin instead, and the idea that it was in his head was just an aspect of Gately's dream.
[The fact that the cartridge is supposedly in JOI's head seems like this was mostly meant to be an allusion to the graveyard scene from Hamlet, where Hamlet holds up Poor Yorick's skull and calls him a fellow of infinite jest - if I was witty then I would make some joke here about how in JOI's case the Infinite Jest was literal, but like, alas.]
So now, the main questions that arise are: 1) what's making them do this? and 2) why Gately, Hal, and John Wayne?
If we consider Gately's impressions of Hal from his vision to be true, then Hal is aware of the importance/"Continental Emergency" status of the Entertainment, which would indicate that he knows that Canadian Separatist groups (maybe specifically the AFR) are trying to obtain the Entertainment to terrorize the U.S. and that he believes they do not have it. The fact that he is shown to be desperately trying to dig it up also implies they are all working together, since if they were held captive by the AFR as represented by John Wayne in this scenario, it wouldn't make as much sense for Hal to be that motivated to find the tape. Since John Wayne is likely an AFR spy (see Q7 for evidence), then Hal & Gately at least believe that he's helping them and not the AFR, though the truth of his loyalties is unknown (maybe he is pretending to betray the AFR to Hal & Gately or actually betraying them while pretending to betray – triple(?) crossing them similar to Marathe). Either way, something does happen to John Wayne in the end that prevents him from competing in the WhataBurger, so it seems likely that he does betray the AFR.
Then there's also the question of how Hal would know about the Entertainment's effects and that people were searching for it:
One option is that Joelle informs him about it, since through her interview with Steeply, she was made aware that people were trying to find the master copy of the Entertainment because of its ability to paralyze people and the fact that the AFR were searching for her because of it. It seems reasonably likely that if she saw Hal, she would recognize him as Orin's brother and tell him about the potential danger of being targeted by the AFR due to being related to the film/filmmaker in some way. There is the potential for them to meet at the hospital if Joelle is visiting Gately there, since during November in the Year of Glad, Hal recalls that he was taken to the hospital almost exactly one year ago, which would line up with the time where Gately is in the hospital:
"At the only other emergency room I have ever been in, almost exactly one year back …" (16).
This would also account for Gately & Hal meeting each other and perhaps getting the idea to work with each other to retrieve the Entertainment through Joelle informing them both about it. If not there, then there's also an ominous line from Johnette (Ennet House staff member), which seems to imply that Hal revisits Ennet House in some way, another potential way of meeting Joelle and/or Gately:
"Much later, in subsequent events' light, Johnette F. would clearly recall the sight of the boy's frozen hair slowly settling, and how the boy had said whom, and the sight of clear upscale odor-free saliva almost running out over his lower lip as he fought to pronounce the word without swallowing." (787).
Another option of Hal finding out about the Entertainment would be through the AFR's invasion of ETA. We know from the AFR's perspective, that after failing to find Joelle, their plan was to invade ETA in order to capture JOI's relatives for technical interviews:
"After Rémy Marathe and Ossowiecke, and Balbalis also, they all reported back negatively for all signs of this veiled performer, M. Fortier and Marathe threw into an effect this finally most drastic of the operations for the locating of the Master Entertainment. This was to acquire members of the immediate family of the auteur, perhaps in public." (845).
It is unclear who exactly they were after, but I think we can assume it would be Avril, Mario, Hal, and possibly C.T. We know that the AFR do end up at ETA because of the rumors that are told in the locker rooms while the players are getting ready:
"An hysterical rumor that the Quebec players had been spotted coming down a ramp out of a charter-bus in the main lot and were by all appearances not the Quebec J.D.C. and -W.C. squads but some sort of Special-Olympicish Quebec adult wheelchair-tennis contingent …" (965).
However, their plans at ETA could be foiled due to the blizzard occurring, since due to the change in venue, they could have been prevented from going further on school grounds, potentially having to be shuttled to the new location before getting the chance to get near any of JOI's family members:
"The word was that Tavis and Schtitt had chartered three buses to take the squads to an indoor venue Mrs. Inc had had alumnus Corbett Th-Thorp call in mammoth favors to arrange — several mostly unused courts somewhere in the deep-brain tissue of the M.I.T. Student Union — and that the whole gala would be moved over to the Student Union, and that the Quebec team and most of the guests were being contacted by cellular about the cancellation of the previous cancellation and the change in venue, and that those guests who didn't hear about the change would ride in the buses with the players and staff, some of them in formal- and evening-wear, probably, the guests." (966).
This depends on the AFR being willing to follow the requests of the ETA staff to keep up their ruse and avoid detection, which does seem to be a priority of theirs given that their invasion plan was a last resort:
"Less better was the indirect route: surveillance and infiltrating the surviving associates of the Entertainment's auteur, its actress and rumored performer, relatives — if necessary, taking them and subjecting them to technical interview, leading with hope to the original auteur's cartridge of the Entertainment. This had risks and exposures and was held abeyant until the directer route — to locate and secure a Master copy of the Entertainment on their own — had been exhausted." (719).
If the AFR does end up going to the MIT Student Union for the tennis matches, then their options for Incandenza family members to kidnap could be limited. Where the book left off, Hal was in the ETA locker rooms with the rest of the team and Mario, Avril, and C.T. 's locations were unknown but likely somewhere at ETA. It's likely that Avril would stay at ETA due to her agoraphobia and also possible that Mario would stay since he doesn't play in any matches (though he could attend for photography reasons – in which case Mario wouldn't be a good subject for the AFR, since he was untorturable due to his inability to feel pain). If Hal and C.T. are the only options, it's possible that the AFR would only be after Hal if they considered C.T. to not be of interest due to him not being that closely related to JOI. Then it's also possible that Hal's condition causes him to go to the hospital on this exact day before the AFR can get to him, given that he mentions that he visits the emergency room around this time (p. 16). This is how the AFR can fail. It's even somewhat vaguely supported by the text by the fact that Hal mentions meeting a supposedly Quebecois woman during his time in the emergency room, which could imply that the AFR has him followed after failing to kidnap him:
"… in the end chair, right up next to the strap-secured head of my stretcher, was a T-shirted woman with barnwood skin and a trucker's cap and a bad starboard list who began to tell me, lying there restrained and immobile, about how she had seemingly overnight suffered a sudden and anomalous gigantism in her right breast, which she referred to as a titty; she had an almost parodic Québecois accent and described the 'titty's' presenting history and possible diagnoses for almost twenty minutes before I was rolled away." (16).
The scenario where the AFR are prevented from being able to capture any of the Incandenzas seems unlikely. But the AFR's plans have often been so convoluted that it's somewhat believable that they'd fail. Personally, I like to believe that they aren't able to capture any of the Incandenza family (other than Orin), mostly because it seems like Hal & C.T. 's lives are relatively normal in the first chapter and they do not allude to any incidents involving kidnapping or torture (also, it's mentioned that Hal does well in the Whataburger, which occurs about a week from the AFR invasion, so whatever does happen, it must not be that big of a deal since ETA sends their students out to the Whataburger). The AFR also could have just abandoned the ETA invasion if things were going wrong and if they had already gotten the information they were looking for from Orin's technical interview.
So then, on the small chance that AFR fails to capture anyone at ETA, the AFR showing up at ETA would still be a unignorable occurrence, which if Hal meets Joelle at the hospital and she tells him about the AFR being after her due to the Entertainment, he would likely assume they were also after him or his family, leading him to get involved with trying to find the master copy if he understands their intentions with it. On the greater chance that the AFR does capture anyone or holds people hostage, then this would also be motivating for Hal to search for the master copy if Hal manages not to get captured himself (though it's hard to believe that Hal gets captured based on Gately's vision, since if he was tortured for information, it seems like he would assume the AFR would already have it and not go search for the master copy himself).
The involvement of Gately and John Wayne is confusing, I can only theorize based on other character connections since they all are mostly unfamiliar with each other.
For Gately, he could be going with Hal on behalf of Joelle, since she has to stay in Ennet House as a patient and he has freedom as a staff member. Or possibly the AFR succeeds in capturing Joelle (or she goes into witness protection through the USOUS) and he ends up helping Hal as a result of him trying to get her back or figure out what happened to her. The timeline of this is also confusing due to his injury, as in how is it possible for him to help dig while he just got severely injured and is in danger of dying; it would seem like this would have to occur several weeks or months after Gately's time in the hospital (though for theories on this, see Q11).
For John Wayne, it seems like the only reason he could be there relates to the AFR. Maybe he betrays the AFR and informs Hal about the AFR being after Hal & his family/Joelle and their plans with the Entertainment, going with him to help prevent the AFR from getting it. Maybe instead he's ordered by the AFR to go with Hal in order to retrieve the master copy for them, with the reason being that the AFR is unable to navigate the area due to their wheelchairs, also pretending to be helping Hal instead of the AFR (or actually betraying the AFR).
In the end, there isn't a clear explanation for Hal, Gately, & John Wayne coming together to dig up JOI's head (and also potentially many other possibilities for them being there that I haven't addressed), but it seems like Hal's motivation is to prevent people from getting the Entertainment, John Wayne's motivation is unclear but either working for or against the AFR, and Gately is mostly there to help Hal.
In case any of it was unclear, in the opening chapter of the book from the Year of Glad (1 year after most of the events of the novel), Hal has become unable to communicate; his facial expressions, actions, and words are perceived as strange and incomprehensible to the college administrators and presumably everyone else. He is also unable to write or type anything legible, as he resorts to using past essays for his application:
"The essays are old ones, yes, but they are mine; de moi. But they are, yes, old, not quite on the application's instructed subject of Most Meaningful Educational Experience Ever. If I'd done you one from the last year, it would look to you like some sort of infant's random stabs on a keyboard, and to you, who use whomsoever as a subject." (9).
His inability to communicate and write affects his grades: "My transcript for the last year might have been dickied a bit, maybe, but that was to get me over a rough spot." (p. 10), and causes him to score badly on his Boards (which occur on 12/12 YDAU, mentioned on p. 218):
"The Admissions staff is looking at standardized test scores from you that are, as I'm sure you know and can explain, are, shall we say … subnormal … —verbal scores that are just quite a bit closer to zero than we're comfortable with …" (6).
This condition begins in November YDAU sometime shortly after what happens in the last sections of the novel, implied by his first visit to the emergency room supposedly occurring around that time: "At the only other emergency room I have ever been in, almost exactly one year back …" (p. 16).
[Also, I'm not sure if this is a factor of the world in Infinite Jest being different or an education system that I am unfamiliar with, but it looks like this condition caused Hal to be held back a year/semester (probably due to his grades), since he is still at ETA in November Year of Glad at the age of 18 and apparently graduating in December:
"You are Harold Incandenza, eighteen, date of secondary-school graduation approximately one month from now, attending the Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, Massachusetts, a boarding school, where you reside …" (3).
The normal assumption is that he would've graduated in Spring YDAU with the rest of his class since they all were 17 and seemed to be the oldest kids at ETA; Hal's birthday was in June (p. 27), so he falls within that age range. Orin was also said to be 17 when he applied for college (p. 283) and started at B.U. in autumn (p. 289), which indicates that ETA follows the standard education system.]
So then the main question is what causes Hal's condition? There are a couple of things hinted in the text that could have the ability to affect him in this way: DMZ (or the mold that hypothetically has the same qualities as DMZ), the Entertainment, or possibly Schizophrenia.
[There are many theories online that address this question; I'll give a brief summary of the main ones I've seen based on these options:
Toothbrush dosing theory: The DMZ that had gone missing was put on Hal's toothbrush by JOI's wraith, who was doing this in order to get Hal to move away from solipsism and start to feel again. This is supported by Hal's odd behavior on Nov 20 after he brushes his teeth, as well as the amount of focus on his toothbrush & the idea of toothbrush dosing during these scenes.
Mold theory: The mold that Hal ate as a child causes Hal's body to synthesize DMZ, which activates due to Hal's marijuana withdrawal, or potentially from other notable details in the text such as tooth issues/sugar intake. This is supported by DMZ being synthesized from a mold growing on top of other molds, which is similar to Orin's description of the mold Hal ate.
Entertainment theory: Hal watches the Entertainment and doesn't die, since the film was supposed to have been made for him, but he ends up unable to communicate afterwards. This could occur if a copy was left at ETA and Hal finds it while continuing to watch more of JOI's films or potentially Hal gets captured by the AFR during their invasion of ETA and during a technical interview is forced to watch the film.
Schizophrenia theory: Hal misperceptions of reality are due to him developing Schizophrenia. The potential is there, since the average age of onset for Schizophrenia tends to be in the late teens to the early 20s for men and its cause includes genetics, which considering JOI's madness seems probable, and environmental factors, one of which is early cannabis usage (according to wikipedia).
I think all of these are useful ways to view the ending, though there are aspects to each of them that I find unconvincing; here are some counterarguments:
Toothbrush dosing theory: DMZ comes in the form of drug tablets which seems difficult to dose a toothbrush with. Also, JOI's wraith is most likely the one moving the ceiling panels and removing the DMZ, but it doesn't make sense that JOI would want to dose Hal with the DMZ; if anything it seems like he's trying to hide it from him, especially since he didn't want Hal doing drugs: "Toward the end, he'd begun privately to fear that his son was experimenting with Substances." (838). Based on what else JOI said to Gately, Hal's condition is him becoming a figurant, which is exactly what JOI wanted to prevent, so dosing him seems counterproductive to everything that he wanted. Anyone else dosing Hal doesn't seem likely either, since there doesn't seem to be a reasonable motive and the DMZ is implied to have gone missing.
Mold theory: Seems physically improbable for the mold to affect Hal after that many years. Also, based on the impression when first reading through the section, the mold introduced at the beginning seemed more like a metaphorical comparison to what the actual cause would be, something to keep in mind that would eventually connect to the real reason that he ends up like that, to be introduced later on rather than a definitive explanation given at the moment. There are textual similarities between the mold and the DMZ, but there are also many other objects/ideas in the text that show up in different throughlines as thematic motifs that relate to each other without making plot relevant connections, such as the yellow smiling face in Gately's dreams/5 year old Hal's slippers/Marathe's mask/Entertainment copies/etc. [Also, DFW used this same mold story as well in his essay "Tennis, Trigonometry, and Tornados," which to me makes it seem less likely to be a generated plot element for Infinite Jest.]
Entertainment theory: It's hard to believe that there would be something about Hal that would cause him to be affected differently by the Entertainment and not just be killed like everyone else. The potential paths that would lead to him watching the Entertainment seem unlikely as well. Also, Hal's own statement about his condition contradicts this theory: "Call it something I ate." (p. 10).
Schizophrenia theory: Schizophrenia is the cause most true to reality perhaps, but it comes off as narratively dull, as similarly disappointing as the trope of the narrator being in a coma the whole time. Hal's "Call it something I ate" line also contradicts this theory.]
Even though I don't agree with any of the main theories I've read online, I don't think I can really provide a better explanation than what's already out there. This is because I think the text is purposefully misleading and obfuscates anything that would lead to a clear path in explaining Hal's condition in order to make the ending seem inexplicable and leave the reader feeling like there's something missing. As in, I don't think there is supposed to be a solvable ending, that the truth lies outside of the text in the projected future of the novel that occurs from November YDAU to November Year of Glad and was purposely not written to leave Hal's condition a mystery to the reader.
[In particular, I believe the text goes out of its way to address certain possibilities in order to make their plausibility more questionable. For example, the amount of emphasis on depicting the collection of JOI's tapes that Hal watches near the end of the book as clearly labeled while the copies of the Entertainment are always shown to be unlabeled tapes are meant to dissuade the possibility that Hal's condition is caused by watching a copy of the Entertainment at ETA. Similarly, the emphasis on toothbrush drugging and Hal's fixation on ensuring that his toothbrush is not left unattended seems to also dissuade the possibility of being unknowingly drugged by someone. Then as well, the DMZ going missing would also discourage the possibility of Hal being able to take the DMZ himself.]
Still, I'll give my take on the ending, starting from when it looks like the effects of Hal's condition supposedly begin:
Regarding Hal's strange behavior during November 20 YDAU, what I find particularly illuminating is this quote from DFW in his interview with Dave Eggers, where he talks about the effects of quitting chewing tobacco:
"I have tried probably ten serious times to quit chewing tobacco in the last decade. I've never even made it a year. Besides all the well-documented psychic fallout, the hardest thing about quitting for me is that it makes me stupid. Really stupid. As in walking into rooms and forgetting why I'm there, drifting off in the middle of sentences, feeling coolness on my chin and discovering I've been drooling. Without chew, I have the attention span of a toddler. I giggle and sob inappropriately. And everything seems very, very far away. In essence it's like being unpleasantly stoned all the time… and as far as I can tell it's not a temporary withdrawal thing. I quit for eleven months once, and it was like that the whole time." [link].
The way he describes the loss of control over his actions after trying to quit tobacco sounds a lot like how Hal acts after he stops smoking weed. This leads me to believe that Hal's odd behavior in the last chapters told from his perspective was DFW trying to accurately depict the effects of withdrawal from a drug, rather than the behavior being necessarily caused by a plot element. This would also explain the instance of Hal having uncontrolled facial expressions the day before the morning of the 20th (where Hal supposedly gets dosed with DMZ according to the toothbrush theory, for example):
"The woman behind the register at the Shell station last night had recoiled as I approached to present my card before pumping, as if she too had seen something in my expression I hadn't known was there." (899).
[Also, there is another instance of Hal being concerned with his expression during the Eschaton game, ("For a brief moment that Hal will later regard as completely and uncomfortably bizarre, Hal feels at his own face to see whether he is wincing." (342)), but he is smoking weed during this moment; this is probably a factor of drug use affecting people's perceptions with/without the effects of withdrawal – though if I were a mold theory believer, I would say that this supports a gradual change in Hal's psyche from perhaps the latent effects of the mold he ate as a child, rather than a single event such as DMZ dosing, but I am not a mold theory believer.]
Hal's tendency to lie in stasis and introspect during this time also connects back to the Ennet House sections, where often a person in withdrawal starts having old memories resurface and relives what they had been previously repressing with drugs, for example in Gately's experience:
"Near the end of his Ennet residency, at like eight months clean and more or less free of any chemical compulsion, going to the Shattuck every A.M. and working the Steps and getting Active and pounding out meetings like a madman, Don Gately suddenly started to remember things he would just as soon not have. Remembered. Actually remembered's probably not the best word. It was more like he started to almost reexperience things that he'd barely even been there to experience, in terms of emotionally, in the first place." (446).
But then if Hal's odd behavior in the morning of Nov 20th was just an effect of withdrawal, this still doesn't fully explain Hal's condition because something more had to have happened to make Hal completely incomprehensible – I don't think the effects of withdrawal could have caused it.
[Though I do think the depiction of Hal in the first chapter is supposed to be effectively a kind of exaggerated nightmare-scenario based on the same type of fears of losing control of your body caused by withdrawal or drug use (and also anxiety over being severely misperceived/mocked when trying to express sincere thoughts). From the same interview question as quoted before, DFW describes a recent attempt to quit chewing tobacco and the subsequent withdrawal effects:
"On the other hand, chewing tobacco kills you—or at the very least it makes your teeth hurt and turn unpleasant colors and eventually fall out. Plus it's disgusting, and stupid, and a vector of self-contempt. So, once again, I've quit. It's now been a little over three months. At this moment I have in gum, a mint, and three Australian tea-tree toothpicks that a Wiccan friend swears by. One reason you and I are chatting in print rather than in real time is that it's taken me twenty minutes just to formulate and press the appropriate keys for the preceding question. Actually speaking with me would be like visiting a demented person in a nursing home. Apparently I not only drift off in the middle of a sentence but sometimes begin to hum, tunelessly, without being aware of it. Also, FYI, my left eyelid has been twitching nonstop since August 18. It's not pretty." [link].
His experience with withdrawal seems to be largely centered around a breakdown in his ability to communicate as well as his ability to moderate the impression he wants to give off, and his exaggerations of these effects are reminiscent of Hal's behavior in the first chapter of the book.]
This is the part where I believe it's up to the reader to decide what their interpretation of the cause of Hal's condition should be, since I think there isn't supposed to be a clear reason in the text itself. I don't think the plot details matter as much compared to the overall themes of the work, so I think the best answer is whatever is most personally meaningful or acceptable enough so that you don't have to infinitely reread the book for some type of closure.
So going back to the potential options for his condition, my personal opinion is that Hal chooses to take the DMZ himself sometime after his last appearance in the novel. This is partially because of what Hal says in the first chapter:
"'I cannot make myself understood, now.' I am speaking slowly and distinctly. 'Call it something I ate.'" (10).
This statement is supposed to give an ambiguous explanation for his inability to communicate, but it does pretty much imply that from Hal's perspective, he attributes his condition to something he ate and has an awareness of the substance, which wouldn't make as much sense if he had been unknowingly dosed.
Most of the rest of my belief in this theory is based on intuitive inference from earlier parts of the book and what I believe the thematics of the novel point towards:
From the moment the DMZ was introduced, it appeared like it was being set up as the explanation for Hal's condition in the first chapter and something to anticipate negatively as a type of tragic demise for him. When Hal & Pemulis first make their plans to take the DMZ, "the window of opportunity looks to be 11/20-21" (p. 217), it feels like one of the most significant plot points that would potentially lead to serious consequences. The fact that the book ends on the morning of the 20th, right before they had planned to take the DMZ, is not a coincidence; it's another example of one of the multiple instances of deferred gratification.
[There are many cases in the book where seemingly important scenes are built up to but then never depicted or only partially gone over often through a secondary account of what happened. This is in line with the themes of rejecting pure entertainment but also compels the reader to infer for themselves what had actually happened through considering what leads up to the scene and the results afterwards. In almost every case, what occurs is able to be understood without the scene being thoroughly portrayed through a primary source (though the delayed gratification aspect does lead to frustration due to the addictive/cliffhanger quality about it). Based on knowing the results (Hal's condition in the Year of Glad) and what leads up to it (plan to take DMZ on 11/20), the omitted section gives off the impression that Hal does end up taking the DMZ even if the exact details leading up to it start to become unclear – the omission itself leaves the possibility open for Hal to acquire the DMZ even if its location is unknown at the end of the book.
Also considering the statements made by DFW about the structure of Infinite Jest being a Sierpinski Gasket [link], if interpreted in a plot-centric view, the three major triangles are reflected by the three narratives involving ETA, Ennet House, and the AFR/USOUS (with central characters Hal, Gately, and Marathe), and the way that important scenes are often omitted or the major action is described second-hand represents the missing centers of the triangles. In particular the central missing section within each major triangle/narrative is what happened to Hal to cause his condition, whether or not Gately lives (and whether he gets convicted for his past crimes and goes back to prison), and who finds the master copy of the Entertainment between the AFR/USOUS. Each narrative collides to make up the central missing triangle, which is the scene where Gately, Hal, and John Wayne dig up the Entertainment (with John Wayne representing the AFR/USOUS side of things).]
Considering that one of the major themes is drug use with the moral stance of the novel strongly against it, the whole storyline of the Ennet House side of things & dialogue on addiction/sobriety would support the idea that Hal's drug use was the cause of his condition, tying the threads together thematically. Compared to Gately's progression from heavily addicted to maintaining long term sobriety, Hal initially appears like he is following the same path, but his condition in the Year of Glad indicates that he fails to escape his addiction and suffers for it. The scene with the inner infant meeting in particular feels like a negative turning point for Hal; that he was on his way to getting clean & quitting drugs and could have kept going that way if he had gone to a supportive AA-adjacent group but instead ended up at the inner infant meeting, which effectively crushes his resolve for doing so. The fact that the inner infant meeting is pretty much Hal's last plot-driven scene, and that he doesn't attempt to seek help with his drug problem after that, feels like a dark indication that he would continue his drug use.
However, it is true that Hal does profess to not wanting to take the DMZ when Pemulis comes by: "The Eeday Emmay Eezay. The synthetic bacchanal. That's definitely off, Mike." (p. 908). But still, it is doubtful whether he would stick with that if he was able to take the DMZ, considering how he was struggling with the effects of his withdrawal and how during the Eschaton game, Hal was shown to not have a strong resolve when drugs were available, as he initially commits to "declining all public chemicals, he's decided" (p. 331), but then later goes against his decision:
"At some point Axford has passed the remainder of the cigarette back over toward Struck without looking to see that Struck is no longer in his chair, and Hal finds himself taking the proffered duBois and smoking dope in public without even thinking about it or having consciously decided to go ahead." (331-332).
Hal also shows a strong interest in taking a lot of the DMZ without much caution about its potential effects during the scene where Hal, Pemulis, and Axford are first discussing the DMZ: "'Two or even three tablets, maybe?' Hal says, knowing he sounds greedy but unable to help himself." (213). Then even after Pemulis explains the story about an army convict losing his mind due to it, Hal does not seem dissuaded:
"'I'm thinking these look like two tablets are possibly a hit. A kind of Motrinish look to them.'
'Visual guesswork isn't going to do it. This is not Bob Hope, Inc.'
'We could even designate it "Ethel," for on the phone,' Axford suggests.
Pemulis watches Hal arranging the tablets into the same general cardioid-shape as E.T.A. itself. 'What I'm saying. This is not a fools-rush-in-type substance, Inc. This show-tune soldier like left the planet.'
'Well, so long as he waves every so often.'" (215).
Hal does insist that Pemulis research DMZ in a medical library before anyone takes it, but only to "physically verify that the compound is both organic and nonaddictive" (216). He is shown to have more reservations about taking it later on however, considering his dream about becoming the army convict:
"'It was a DMZ-dream … It involved your experimental soldier, the massive dose … It was the Leavenworth convict. The one you said had left the planet. The one belting out Ethel Merman. It was horrific, Mikey. In the dream I was the soldier.'
'So you're now going to assume a real you-know-what experience will be similar to the experience of a nightmare.'
'Aha. Why nightmare? Why do you assume it was a nightmare? Did I use the word nightmare?'
'You used the word horrific. I assume it wasn't a romp through the heather.'
'In the dream the horror was that I wasn't really singing "There's No Business Like Show Business." I was really screaming for help. I was screaming like "Help! I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers! It's me! It's me, screaming for help!"'
'A Rusk-level dream, Inc. A standard nobody-understands-me dream. The DMZ and Mermanization were incidental.'
'There was a quality of loneliness to it, though. Unlike anything. To be screaming that I'm screaming for help instead of singing a show-tune and to have the wardens and doctors gathered around snapping their fingers and tapping their feet.'" (Ft. 321, pp. 1063-1064).
Though it does show the beginning of Hal's doubts with DMZ, this dream mostly feels like a strong premonition of DMZ causing Hal's condition, since it specifically emulates the issue he has with failing to communicate with people and being misperceived. Also, Hal's refutation of considering the dream as a nightmare is a bit odd; overall the rest of his conversation with Pemulis about drug usage comes off as Hal being more concerned with being addicted to marijuana rather than the potential negative effects of DMZ.
As for how Hal gets the DMZ, there isn't really a substantial explanation because, like I said before, I think the book purposefully misdirects regarding a clear reason for anything that would lead to Hal's condition, though I think if the wraith had removed the DMZ tablets from Pemulis's hiding place, it's possible that they would still be somewhere on the school grounds, since there had been a previous example of wraith activity where an object was moved to a different location within ETA (tripod that appeared to U.S.S. Millicent in two different locations, see Q9 for more info).
In the end, there isn't much proof to believe this theory over another, though the main issue I have with other theories is the lack of agency given to Hal. For a book so concerned with overcoming addiction and the strength of will needed to get out of it, it seems against the point of Gately's storyline and utterly hopeless without much reason (except for maybe cruelty/the harsh reality of things) to have Hal be completely doomed and unable to do anything to prevent himself from being incapacitated by events out of his control (i.e. someone else dosing him with drugs or some mold he ate as a kid). Though an argument can be made that the idea that Hal is doomed falls more in line with tragedy narratives, which may be intentional as a connection to Hamlet. It is also more of a personal opinion that I prefer the idea of people having the free will to make their own bad decisions and taking responsibility for the consequences that follow, which may be an overly moralizing reading of the work.
-Does the AFR kill Orin?
No. In Hal's college admissions interview in the Year of Glad, Orin is implied to still be playing pro football from one of the administrators: "The brother's in the bloody NFL for God's sake." (14). Though his last appearance was him being under technical interview by the AFR, there is precedent for them letting someone live, since it seems like their technical interview of Sixties Bob did not end up with him dying even though Kite's "regrettably" did (p. 721). The AFR was also motivated to keep their operation secret, so maybe the fact that Orin was an NFL player would influence them to not kill him.
-Does the AFR kill anyone from ETA?
Not likely. From the administrators again, we know that Hal attends the Whataburger ("We watched him through the whole WhataBurger last fall." (p. 14)), which would occur about a week after the AFR's invasion of ETA, so whatever occurs during the invasion isn't significant enough to stop the normal functions of the academy. At least two other students from ETA are known to have survived the invasion, since Ortho Stice and Petropolis Kahn, who were in Boys 16's in YDAU, play in the Whataburger in the Year of Glad:
"I have never before faced Dymphna in tournament play, nor played with the sonic balls the blind require, but I watched him barely dispatch Petropolis Kahn in the Round of 16, and I know he is mine … I will play either Stice or Polep in Sunday's final." (17).
There also doesn't seem to be any significant changes to ETA administration, since Charles Tavis and Avril are still running it ("… as against a secondary-school transcript from the institution where both your mother and her brother are administrators …" (p. 6)), which supports the idea that nothing out of the ordinary has happened to the school. There was an eerie sentence that implied that the AFR may have killed some of the younger students at ETA ("… this rumor flew wildly around the locker room and then died out when a couple of the sub-14's who burned nervous energy by scampering around checking rumors scampered out and up the stairs to check the rumor and failed to return." (p. 965)), but the way that ETA has continued to run normally up to the Year of Glad implies that nothing serious happened.
-Does the AFR kill the Quebec tennis players who were meant to play in the ETA Exhibition match?
It's unclear, but it seems implied that some of them survive at least:
From the AFR's plans to steal the bus that the Quebec players would arrive in, it's stated that if the bus was not operational after causing it to crash, then they would only save 6 children and leave the rest to die. During these plans, it's clearly noted that the bus they would arrive in was chartered:
"The bus was large and chartered and appeared warm within. Above its windshield its lit rectangle of destination displayed the English word for charter. If the bus survived the swerve from the highway's mirror and was operational after the crash of swerving, Balbalis would drive this bus. There was one brief argument over who would be required to drive the van, for Balbalis refused to leave the van behind them even if the bus was operational. If the bus was not operational, no more than six junior children as survivors could be accommodated in the van. The rest would be allowed to die for leur rai pays." (846).
Later, when the AFR arrive at ETA, it's noted that they had arrived in a charter-bus:
"An hysterical rumor that the Quebec players had been spotted coming down a ramp out of a charter-bus in the main lot and were by all appearances not the Quebec J.D.C. and -W.C. squads but some sort of Special-Olympicish Quebec adult wheelchair-tennis contingent…" (965).
Since they arrived in a bus instead of their van, it's likely that this was the same bus and that the bus survived the crash. It's not stated what the plan was for the children if the bus was operational, but since they were planning to at least save 6 in the worst case scenario, then potentially the children could have all survived and were dropped off somewhere else before the AFR came to ETA. But still, they are not mentioned again so it's unclear how many children actually survived the bus robbery.
-Does the AFR kill a bunch of people by disseminating the Entertainment?
Unclear as well. Given the state of Hal's college admissions interview in the Year of Glad, it appears that life continues as normal. If the Entertainment had become a widespread killing device in the US, I would expect that more people would know about the film and filmmaker, enough that there would be some interest in JOI's alive relatives, but none of the administrators mention anything significant about Hal or his family at ETA.
[Though it is possible that even if the Entertainment was terrorizing the country, the people within the type of society that the novel depicts wouldn't react much, since the general population also doesn't seem to worry about the dystopian toxic waste dump increasing deformities/mutations around the areas surrounding the Concavity/Convexity.]
Whether or not the AFR does end up with the master copy of the Entertainment and starts distributing it to the US general population or just to political opponents, there are indications of war occuring in the Year of Glad from the fighter plane that Hal sees outside:
"The issue whether the damaged even have interested wills is shallowly hashed out as some sort of ultra-mach fighter too high overhead to hear slices the sky from south to north." (16).
Since Hal's interview was in Arizona and the plane was heading north, if this indicates war, then it's most likely a US plane attacking Canada or possibly a plane from Mexico (or the AFR - they had a routing dissemination-scheme somewhere between Arizona & the border (p. 90)) attacking the US.
It also appears that something significant happens in either that year or the next (probably the collapse of ONAN if the countries were at war with each other), since the subsidized time naming system ends after the Year of Glad:
From this I would assume that there was a war occuring, most likely provoked by the possession or usage of the master copy of the Entertainment. If the AFR had the master copy, it's likely that them using the Entertainment against the US would cause the war, but even just the threat of them having the Entertainment could be enough for the US to scapegoat Canada as the enemy and start a war. If the US had the master copy, it's also possible that the AFR or Canada/Mexico would retaliate due to the tensions that already existed between the countries from the unequal power distribution & anti-Canadian propaganda by the US.
The fact that there's indications of war makes it seem more likely that the AFR obtains the master copy and uses it against the US population, but the general normality in the Year of Glad makes it seem less likely that they have done so. In the end it's still ambiguous which side obtained the Entertainment and what was done with it.
-As for the people the AFR does kill:
Lucian and Bertraund Antitoi are impaled to death by a sharp object (pp. 485-489), Gately's former partner in crime Trent Kite is electrocuted to death in a technical interview (p. 721), and the student engineer from WYYY (p. 727) and Randy Lenz & Poor Tony (p. 845) are forced to watch the Entertainment, which has been shown to be fatal. It's also implied that Kate Gompert goes with Marathe to watch the Entertainment after he offers to show it to her, since she is said to have gone missing after that night, told to Gately by Calvin Thrust, one of Ennet House's staffers:
"Kate Gompert and Ruth van Cleve supposedly went to hit an NA meeting in Inman Square and got supposedly mugged and separated, and then only Ruth van Cleve showed up back at the House, and Pat's sworn out a P.C. warrant for Gompert because of the girl's other psych and suicide issues." (824).
Though it wasn't stated that the people who had been forced to watch the Entertainment had died, it's clear that they would eventually end up dead due to its effects.
Symbolically, Joelle is supposed to represent both sides of JOI's film Medusa vs. the Odalisk: paralyzing hideousness (disfigured by acid) and paralyzing beauty (PGOAT=Prettiest Girl Of All Time), and her representation in the Entertainment calls into question which version of her is seen by the audience such that it kills the person watching, since once her face is shown without a veil, the person watching becomes no longer mentally functional.
Realistically, Joelle is disfigured by acid. There has been doubts about this because of Molly Notkin being an unreliable narrator, but there are other passages in Infinite Jest that reference the acid story (told in pp. 791-795):
Joelle references the acid story twice, once when thinking about Orin:
"Jim's eldest, Orin — punter extraordinaire, dodger of flung acid extraordinaire — had once shown Joelle van Dyne his childhood collection of husks of the Lemon Pledge that the school's players used to keep the sun off." (223).
Then another time when thinking about the events in her life:
"For a while, after the acid, after first Orin left and then Jim came and made her sit through that filmed apology-scene and then vanished and then came back but only to — only four years seven months six days past — to leave, for a while, after taking the veil, for a while she liked to get really high and clean." (225).
Also from Joelle's perspective when going to see Gately in the hospital, it's implied that her looks have changed:
"The last and pretty much only man Joelle ever let herself admire in a romantic way had left and wouldn't even face up to why, instead erecting for himself a pathetic jealous fantasy about Joelle and his own poor father, whose only interest in Joelle had been first aesthetic and then anti-aesthetic." (855).
Then from Hal's perspective during the scene where ETA students are having dinner, he recalls memories of Orin's relations with other Subjects and references Joelle:
"This was after the girl Orin had been wildly in love with and Himself had compulsively used in films had been disfigured." (634).
On the other hand, there is evidence that does imply that she is extremely beautiful under the veil, though most of it can be called into question:
During the section where Orin is described first seeing Joelle and calling her the PGOAT, Joelle is referred to as causing the Actaeon Complex, which is listed as a valid reason to wear a veil in UHID (Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed):
"The twirler induced in heterosexual males what U.H.I.D. later told her was termed the Actaeon Complex, which is a kind of deep phylogenic fear of transhuman beauty." (290).
This description implies that wearing a veil in the future was something she was compelled to do by the UHID because of her extreme beauty. However, at this moment in the novel, this is probably intended to support the misconception that a reader would have after learning about the Entertainment, that her face could have the ability to actually paralyze people due to her beauty & is the actual reason the film kills people.
[Also during this same section, there is a description of her that would imply that she doesn't somehow obtain fatal beauty later in life either: "Still in the last stages of a late puberty and the prettiness getting visibly worse day by day …" (298).]
Another case is in the section where she overdoses, where her conception of her appearance supports the idea that she is extremely beautiful (though she was high in this part and could be said to be idealizing her past appearance):
"… the smoke's baby-blanket blue that's sent her sliding down along the wall past knotted washcloth, towel rack, blood-flower wallpaper and intricately grimed electrical outlet, the light sharp bitter tint of a heated sky's blue that's left her uprightly fetal with chin on knees in yet another North American bathroom, deveiled, too pretty for words, maybe the Prettiest Girl Of All Time (Prettiest G.O.A.T.) …" (239).
The idea of her being not just extremely pretty but paralyzingly beautiful mainly comes from what she says she looks like when Gately asks what's under the veil:
"'Don, I'm perfect. I'm so beautiful I drive anybody with a nervous system out of their fucking mind. Once they've seen me they can't think of anything else and don't want to look at anything else and stop carrying out normal responsibilities and believe that if they can only have me right there with them at all times everything will be all right. Everything. Like I'm the solution to their deep slavering need to be jowl to cheek with perfection.'" (538).
But later on she admits that this was a joke based on JOI's Medusa/Odalisk film that she would say due to her denial over her deformity:
"I used to go around saying the veil was to disguise lethal perfection, that I was too lethally beautiful for people to stand. It was a kind of joke I'd gotten from one of his entertainments, the Medusa-Odalisk thing. That even in U.H.I.D. I hid by hiddenness, in denial about the deformity itself." (940).
[But even so, JOI makes this joke come true in the Entertainment, though apparently it has less to do with her face than the lenses used, according to Joelle:
"I don't think there's much doubt the lens was supposed to reproduce an infantile visual field. That's what you could feel was driving the scene. My face wasn't important. You never got the sense it was meant to be captured realistically by this lens." (940).
Joelle could be right that the lenses are what's important in causing the fatal effect, but it seems like the text suggests that there's an aspect to her face that's essential for the film to have that effect, possibly the duality of deformity/beauty that her face seems to evoke.]
We know that she cannot be lethally beautiful because the physician who treated her after her overdose & sent her to Ennet House saw her unveiled face and was unharmed:
"… like veiled Joelle van Dyne, who entered the House just today, 11/8, Interdependence Day, after the E.R. physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital who last night had pumped her full of Inderal and nitro had looked upon her unveiled face and been deeply affected, and had taken a special interest, a consequence of which after Joelle regained consciousness and speech had involved placing a call to Pat Montesian, whose paralyzing alcoholic stroke the physician had treated in this very same E.R. almost seven years before, and in whose case he'd also taken a special interest and had followed …" (Ft. 134, p. 1025).
[This account of the physician's "special interest" in her does give another clue about her appearance though. Since he is said to have taken interest in both Pat Montesian and Joelle's cases, then this would imply there's something similar in their appearances that would cause him to do so. From Gately's description of Pat Montesian:
"The right side of her face was still pulled way over in this sort of rictus, and her speech took Gately some getting used to — it sounded like she was still loaded all the time, a kind of overenunciated slurring. The half of her face that wasn't rictusized was very pretty, and she had very long pretty red hair, and a sexually credible body even though her right arm had atrophied into a kind of semiclaw …" (465).
Their cases are very similar; they both have red hair and an outwardly attractive body but their face is partially damaged. The fact that half of Pat Montesian's face was pretty would also imply that there is still something pretty about Joelle's face that the physician would take interest in.
We also know from Gately's observation that the lower part of her face is undamaged:
"She leans down and in, so Gately can see up at what looks like a regular human female chin and makeupless lower lip under the veil's billowing hem." (616).
So in all likelihood, Joelle was deformed by the acid but parts of her face are left unharmed such that there's a noticeably pretty aspect about her.]
Though there is also a passage that would seem to suggest lethal beauty in a way, as she describes unveiling as a tactic to get away from Steeply:
"She'd been close to removing the veil to get away from the outside-linebacker of a federal lady anyway." (958).
However, this could just mean she believes the disfigurement caused by the acid would scare Steeply off, as in maybe it would unnerve most people into becoming uncomfortable enough to not want to speak with her. Then, her face would pretty much have the same effect as it did when she was repellingly beautiful back in college.
Considering everything that was said about her appearance, it's meant to be somewhat ambiguous if she's extremely beautiful or not, but I think it's clear that the acid story did happen and that her face is somewhat damaged.
[Though it's possible that the acid story told by Molly Notkin was just something either Joelle or Molly Notkin made up to hide the way it actually happened. Given that most of JOI's films are autobiographically influenced, one girl's backstory in Blood Sister: One Tough Nun could indicate that Joelle's disfigurement was caused by an accident with freebasing cocaine:
"Whether the girl's hideous facial burn-scars are the result of a freebase accident is never made explicit in the film. Bernadette Longley says she kind of hopes that's the case, because otherwise the scars would function as symbols of some deeper and more spiritual wound/hideousness, and the symbolic equation of facial with moral deformity strikes everybody over thirteen in the room as terribly gooey and heavy and stock." (Ft. 290, p. 1053).]
John Wayne is assumed to be the ETA student who is a spy for the AFR, which the AFR mentions in this passage:
"The deceased auteur's colleagues and relations were under consistent surveillance. Their concentration of place worked in the favor of this. An employee at the Academy of Tennis of Enfield had been recruited and joined the Canadian instructor and student already inside for closer work of surveillance." (726).
[The Canadian instructor that is also a spy is presumed to be Thierry Poutrincourt, the lady who teaches the Quebec Separatism class that Hal's in and talks to Steeply during the Hal v. Stice tennis match, due to her going missing on the day of the AFR's invasion of ETA: "Thode had had an hysterical tantrum after breakfast because Poutrincourt hadn't showed for the Females' pre-match Staff thing and looked to be AWOL." (p. 965). The employee that they're talking about is unknown; I've looked extensively but there's no clear evidence that I know of for any employee this could be. It's true that Avril and C.T. are also from Canada, but it makes more sense that they would qualify as JOI's relations to be spied on (and it seems unlikely that anyone would classify their positions at ETA as just "employee"), and if they were recruited it would defeat the purpose of surveillance, as they would be able to answer many of the questions about the Entertainment that the AFR seeks.]
There is a lot of circumstantial evidence that connects Wayne with the AFR, for instance, his background. From the essay on the AFR that Struck reads, we know that the Quebec train cult, which most members of the AFR originate from, was made up of boys whose fathers were specific types of miners:
""La Culte du Prochain Train," often translated as "The Cult of the Next Train," is known to have originated at least a decade prior to Reconfiguration among the male offspring of asbestos, nickel and zinc miners in the desolate Papineau region of what was then extreme southwest Quebec." (Ft. 304, p. 1058).
Wayne's father was said to be an asbestos miner from Quebec:
"Wayne's father is an asbestos miner who at forty-three is far and away the seniorest guy on his shift; he now wears triple-thick masks and is trying to hold on until John Wayne can start making serious $ and take him away from all this. He has not seen his eldest son play since John Wayne's Québecois and Canadian citizenships were revoked last year." (262).
There could also be a familial connection between John Wayne and "Bernard Wayne," the one kid who failed to jump in Train Cult history, given that they have the same last name and were both related to asbestos miners:
"Only once, in le Jeu du Prochain Train's extensive oral history, has a miner's son not jumped, lost his heart and frozen, remaining on his jut as the round's train passed. This player later drowned. "Perdre son coeur" when it is mentioned at all, is known also as "Faire un Bernard Wayne," in dubious honor of this lone unjumping asbestos miner's son, about whom little beyond his subsequent drowning in the Baskatong Reservoir is known, his name denoting a figure of ridicule and disgust among speakers of the Papineau Region vulgate." (Ft. 304, p. 1060).
[Though there is also the possibility that John Wayne is associated with the Cult of the Endless Kiss (origin of the Montcalmists; see Q16 for more info on Separatist groups), since a few times in the text, he is described as having unnatural control over his body (e.g. when he comes by Hal's room and stands there without saying anything: "Now his breathing behind me was light and very even. No waste, complete utilization of each breath." (p. 957)), which is what is trained in the cult: "The figurative object of the "Baisser" competition appears … to involve using what one is given with maximally exhaustive levels of efficiency and endurance before excreting it back whence it came" (Ft. 304, p. 1062).
This could imply that he's not associated with the AFR and some other student is the spy, but it seems more likely that he is the spy based on his actions – though this could explain why he still has functional legs. This is just speculation but perhaps John Wayne was rejected from the train cult for being related to Bernard Wayne and joined the endless kiss cult instead, though still in contact with the AFR and eventually recruited by them.]
Because of this implied connection with the AFR, it's possible that John Wayne's entire purpose of being there at ETA was to spy on the Incandenza family in order to find the Entertainment; this is supported by the time frame of his arrival.
During the Port Washington tennis match, when considering the chances of ETA winning, it's noted that John Wayne wasn't there the previous year:
"But last year E.T.A. didn't have John Wayne, and last year H. J. Incandenza hadn't yet exploded, competitively. John Wayne, formerly of Montcerf, Quebec … was finally successfully recruited by Gerhardt Schtitt and Aubrey deLint last spring …" (259).
So John Wayne wasn't at ETA during Nov YDPAH, and began in Jan YDAU at the earliest. We know from Rodney Tine's perspective that the Entertainment copies started showing up in summer YDPAH (see Q13 for evidence), so considering that John Wayne joins ETA after the AFR are aware of the Entertainment, he could've accepted the offer to join solely to find out more information about the Entertainment. Also, his involvement with Avril (from Hal's POV: "John Wayne had been involved with the Moms sexually since roughly the second month after his arrival." (p. 957)) could potentially be another method of trying to obtain information on the Entertainment (similar to the Luria/Orin situation).
Other indications of him being a spy include his weird behavior to seemingly just observe Hal:
"Over 200 breaths later, John ('N.R.') Wayne opened up the ajar door a little more and put his whole head in and stayed like that, with just his head in. He didn't say anything and Hal didn't say anything, and they stayed like that for a while, and then Wayne's head smoothly withdrew." (560).
As well as indications of Canadian nationalism: for example, a photograph shows "Wayne and a Manitoban in T-shirts with leaves on them, hands over their hearts, facing north" (Ft. 209, p. 1035), and the fact that he only hangs out with other Canadians, as observed by Schacht:
"Wayne tends to eat and study alone. He's sometimes seen with two or three expatriate E.T.A. Nucks, but when they're together they all seem morose." (263).
Him being an AFR spy would at least give some type of reason to him being there with Hal & Gately when digging up JOI's head to presumably find the master copy of the Entertainment, which Hal alludes to in the Year of Glad:
"I think of John N. R. Wayne, who would have won this year's WhataBurger, standing watch in a mask as Donald Gately and I dig up my father's head. There's very little doubt that Wayne would have won." (16-17).
[The fact that Wayne is wearing a mask also connects back to the AFR, as they are often depicted wearing masks when performing an operation:
When invading the Antitois shop: "There are maybe about six or nine A.F.R. here in the drafty back room … masked in synthetic-blend heraldic-flag irises with flaming transperçant stems at the chin and slits for eyes and round utter holes for mouths — all except for one particular of the A.F.R., in an unpretentious sportcoat and tie and the worst mask of all, a plain yellow polyresin circle with an obscenely simple smily-face in thin black lines …" (485-486).
When kidnapping the student engineer: "Q.v. also the wheelchair that now all of a sudden shoots down the hillside's van's ramp …, the legless figure up on burly stumps in the chair fleur-de-lis-with-sword-stem-masked and bent far forward for a skier's pure speed …" (626).
When spying on Orin, from Orin's POV: "'And but so the point is I decamp the trailer like x number of hours later, and the guy's still there, mired in gravel. And in the distance I could swear he's got on some kind of domino-mask. And now everywhere I go the last several days there seems to be a statistically improbable number of wheel-chaired figures around, lurking, somehow just a little too nonchalantly.'" (245).]
The fact that John Wayne is unable to play in the Whataburger in the Year of Glad is most likely explained by his connection to the AFR – that the AFR does something to Wayne to prevent him from being able to play tennis or remain in the US. There's no clear explanation that can be inferred from the text, but the main theory is that the AFR kills or permanently injures him due to him betraying them and helping Gately & Hal. It is questionable why John Wayne would betray the AFR since he seems disinterested in anything/anyone from the US and had still retained his Canadian loyalties, but one explanation I can think of is that he could have hated the AFR because of the way they made Bernard Wayne a figure of ridicule, which also might extend to himself if that was one of his relatives (or even just because they have the same surname). There's also the other possibility that he was on the AFR's side the whole time and since the master copy was not found (or found but not by him), he has no point in being there anymore and goes back to Quebec or joins the AFR.
[I've also read this idea online somewhere, about one of the photographs of Wayne hung up in the ETA admin waiting room foreshadowing what happens to him: "Wayne this summer sliding on Rome's fine clay, a red cloud hiding everything below the knees." (Ft. 209, p. 1034). As in, the AFR paralyzes him/takes his legs, implied by the red cloud (=blood) below his knees. I like this theory since it connects back to one of the often revisited ideas in this book about the anxiety around debilitating injuries ending sports careers.]
Throughout the text it's implied that Avril could have connections to the Quebec Separatist movement, but it's more likely that she wasn't currently involved, mainly because it wouldn't make sense for the AFR to go through all that effort to seek out people minorly connected to the Entertainment when Avril is the person that would know the most about its whereabouts. However, I'll still go over her possible connections:
The main reason for suspicion is that she was born in Quebec and was considered a person of interest supposedly for her involvement with Quebec politics:
"This wife herself a Québecer, Rémy, from L'Islet county — Chief Tine says three years spent on Ottawa's "Personnes Qui On Doit" list." (92).
[She is also from the same county as Luria ("Luria Perec, of Lamartine, county L'Islet, Quebec" (p. 92)), which has led to one theory that Avril is Luria. I'd have to disagree with this theory since Luria is supposed to be a notable political figure in the office of Rodney Tine, supported by her presence in Mario's movie on ONAN Reconfiguration, so it seems like they lived completely separate lives. I think this connection (along with the fact that Luria is almost an anagram for Avril) is just meant to be another implication about the incestual feelings underlying Orin's relationship with Avril, similar to how John Wayne's involvement with Avril implies the same thing about her feelings towards Orin.]
She also does seem to be sympathetic towards the Canadian Separatist movement, given her preference that Hal should take Poutrincourt's Separatist class:
"… Mile. Thierry Poutrincourt's 'Separatism and Return: Québecois History from Frontenac Through the Age of Interdependence,' which to be candid Hal'd never heard much positive about and had always deflected his Moms's suggestions that he might profitably take …" (309).
However, this seems to be the extent of her political involvement, which also could just be related to her many affairs as this passage seems to imply:
"… Professor Mondragon whose involvement, however demonstrably nonviolent, with certain members of the Québecois-Separatist Left while in graduate school had placed her name on the R.C.M.P.'s notorious 'Personnes a Qui On Doit Surveiller Attentivement' List." (64).
It could have been that she was only interested in sleeping with the members of the organization, not that she had a deep interest in the political movement herself. [Though if she ever was part of a Separatist organization, based on the description of her "involvement" being nonviolent and Left-leaning, I'd guess that out of the known Separatist groups (see Q16), she was most likely part of the Fils de Montcalm, or the Cult of the Endless Kiss, which that group originated from.]
JOI also implies that she was involved with DuPlessis and Luria in the Professional Conversationalist section, which may be what was meant in the previous passage describing her past relation to the Separatist movement:
"'Do you for one moment think that a professional plier of the trade of conversation would fail to probe beak-deep into your family's sordid liaison with the pan-Canadian Resistance's notorious M. DuPlessis and his malevolent but allegedly irresistible amanuensis-cum-operative, Luria P---------?'
…
'… of the fact that photos of the aforementioned … liaison being leaked to Der Spiegel resulted in the bizarre deaths of both an Ottawan paparazzo and a Bavarian international-affairs editor, of an alpenstock through the abdomen and an ill-swallowed cocktail onion, respectively?'" (30).
[I would assume that he's accusing Avril of having an affair with DuPlessis (and also possibly referring to Orin's future affair with Luria, since he describes the "liaison" as "your family's" instead of just Avril's), but based on JOI's madness and delusions of Hal not speaking during this section, it's unclear how real his claims are. Similarly, he also makes the claim that Avril was secretly drugging Hal's breakfast to make him smarter:
"…that her introduction of esoteric mnemonic steroids, stereo-chemically not dissimilar to your father's own daily hypodermic "mega-vitamin" supplement derived from a certain organic testosterone-regeneration compound distilled by the Jivaro shamen of the South-Central L.A. basin, into your innocent-looking bowl of morning Ralston…" (30).
There's no evidence of this being true, and given how his madness seems to affect the conversation to a greater degree the longer it goes on, I would read this as a metaphorical claim. My interpretation is that JOI considers Avril's influence or encouragement to be the cause of Hal's obsession with dictionary memorization & etc., which then according to JOI's perception of him, causes Hal to be mute, as in not really speaking for himself, just turning into a reflection of his mother's or other people's expectations of him. Since the main subject of interest from JOI's part in the conversation is Avril, the Professional Conversationalist section seems to be an example of what JOI's wraith admits to Gately:
"The wraith confesses that he had, at one time, blamed the boy's mother for his silence. But what good does that kind of thing do, he said, making a blurred motion that might have been shrugging." (p. 837).]
It seems like it's meant to be a point of uncertainty whether she was involved with the political side of things, though it's hard not to see the aspect of her infidelities as politically motivated, since she was only interested in people from her own country, according to Steeply:
"'Film director's wife'd taught out at Brandeis where the victim'd done his residency. The husband was on board over at A.E.C., and different agencies' background checks indicated the wife was fucking just about everything with a pulse.' With the slight pause of which Steeply could excel: 'Particularly a Canadian pulse.'" (91-92).
But Steeply's line of inquiry doesn't lead anywhere in his conversation with Marathe, who doesn't have any further information on Avril. Though based on her past and her loyalty towards her country and its people, it wouldn't be surprising at all if she was secretly part of the Separatist movement, except for the fact that if she was, then it doesn't make sense for the Canadians to not already have the Entertainment or know where it is. Because of that, I'd have to agree with Molly Notkin's conclusions on Avril's involvement:
"That it seemed pretty unlikely to her, Molly Notkin, that the Auteur's widow had any connections to any anti-American groups, cells, or movements, no matter what the files on her indiscreet youth might suggest, since from everything Molly Notkin's heard the woman didn't have much interest in any agendas larger than her own individually neurotic agendas, even though she came on to Madame Psychosis all sweet and solicitous." (790).
[Irrelevant side note about the Molly Notkin's interview: her character is an obvious example of the unreliable witness and a satirical representation of a type of critic, with her interview functioning as a way of blatantly addressing things that were previously only subtly mentioned in the text (such as the possibility of Orin being sexually abused by Avril as a kid, Avril's political involvement, Joelle's father's incestual feelings towards her & the acid story) though she states her conclusions in a dismissive and judgemental way that makes it difficult to believe in them or her credibility. It's tempting to dismiss everything she says, especially since it's clear she lies or misconstrues things during the interview (the main ones being Joelle's secret background with her real name as "Lucille Duquette" and attributing JOI as having issues with impotence due to a belief in a finite number of erections (p. 789) which were said to be the belief of Molly Notkin's own partner (p. 220)), though some aspects of some of her judgements could have some truth value to them (for example, JOI really does have erectile problems (most likely due to his alcohol consumption), since he takes testosterone boosting supplements, mentioned in his Professional Conversationalist talk with Hal (p. 30)).]
[About Avril's tendency to only have affairs with Canadians, this seems like it was meant as a kind of thematically incestual betrayal (to compare choosing to sleep with people from her birth country rather than her husband from a different country as incest), which supports the analogy between her and Gertrude from Hamlet. Gertrude wasn't directly involved in the murder of King Hamlet, though her marriage with his brother that did kill him (King Claudius) is a kind of betrayal, which could parallel how Avril isn't directly involved with the Separatist movement but has loyalties to the so called enemy and sleeps with them (the direct comparison to King Claudius would be C.T.).]
Though based on her past connections with Separatist groups, it's possible that Avril could've at least heard about the Entertainment cartridge and its effects, potentially through DuPlessis before he died, which could then lead her to remove the cartridge from JOI's grave before anyone else. But then she would have just kept the cartridge for herself or destroyed it, because supposedly all the Canadian groups are still searching for it, which indicates that she didn't give it to them, so this kind of leads to a dead end due to a lack of a clear motive on her part.
It is implied that she had stuff going on behind the scenes, but her intentions are meant to be mysterious; for example, during the Hal vs. Stice match: "Avril Incandenza's whereabouts on the grounds were throughout this interval unknown." (p. 655). If it's not related to the Separatist movement or the Entertainment, I would assume that the secretive aspects of her life have to do with her affairs. There's also a brief mention of her trying to contact someone from Moment that isn't mentioned again:
"Ms. Avril Incandenza, seeming somehow to have three or four cigarettes all going at once, secures from Information the phone and e-mail #s of a journalistic business address on East Tucson AZ's Blasted Expanse Blvd., then begins to dial, using the stern of a blue felt pen to stab at the console's keys." (701).
This is the address that Steeply uses ("From the Desk of Helen Steeply Contributing Editor Moment Magazine 13473 Blasted Expanse Blvd. Tucson, AZ" (p. 663)), so this could potentially be about her having issues with Steeply's presence at ETA or her trying to get information about the Orin interviews, if assuming underhanded intentions on her part. Or it could just be her trying to contact Moment Magazine to fix a grammar issue, like she does with errors in supermarket signs.
Though it's difficult to come to any conclusion about Avril's intentions, I would assume that she's trying to be a normal if overbearing mother who has issues with OCD & infidelity & incestual feelings towards her son (see Q12 for more speculation on her relationship with Orin), not that she's involved with any greater political factions.
Ghosts exist in the book as wraiths, which are able to affect reality by communicating with people or moving objects around occasionally. The main one is JOI's wraith, which first appears to Gately in the hospital (pp. 829-839), and later on briefly shows up again with Lyle (p. 933), who also appears to be a wraith (see Q10 for more on that). In JOI's discussion with Gately, he claims that wraiths exist in a different dimension than normal people, though they are able to communicate by using a person's own internal voice or appear as visible to them if they stay still in the same place long enough; here's the section containing the main points on wraith qualities, for clarity's sake:
"The wraith said Even a garden-variety wraith could move at the speed of quanta and be anywhere anytime and hear in symphonic toto the thoughts of animate men, but it couldn't ordinarily affect anybody or anything solid, and it could never speak right to anybody, a wraith had no out-loud voice of its own, and had to use somebody's like internal brain-voice if it wanted to try to communicate something, which was why thoughts and insights that were coming from some wraith always just sound like your own thoughts, from inside your own head, if a wraith's trying to interface with you. The wraith says By way of illustration consider phenomena like intuition or inspiration or hunches, or when someone for instance says 'a little voice inside' was telling them such-and-such on an intuitive basis. … The wraith was pushing his glasses up and saying Besides, it took incredible discipline and fortitude and patient effort to stay stock-still in one place for long enough for an animate man actually to see and be in any way affected by a wraith, and very few wraiths had anything important enough to interface about to be willing to stand still for this kind of time, preferring ordinarily to whiz around at the invisible speed of quanta. … He says Wraiths by and large exist (putting his arms out slowly and making little quotation-mark finger-wiggles as he said exist) in a totally different Heisenbergian dimension of rate-change and time-passage. As an example, he goes on, normal animate men's actions and motions look, to a wraith, to be occurring at about the rate a clock's hour-hand moves, and are just about as interesting to look at." (831).
[The idea that a wraith communicates using a person's internal brain-voice retroactively accounts for instances in a character's pov where they would use words that would be out of character for them to know or use (e.g. "Pemulis doesn't actually literally say 'breath and bread.'" (Ft. 130, p. 1025)), if you believe that whoever is recording the narrative is a wraith. There is one theory that JOI is the narrator, as in that the representation of any perspective in the novel is filtered through JOI's vocabulary/interpretation of the events while also inflected with the person's own voice when it is from a different character. This seems to be blatantly implied with the section where Gately is bombarded with "ghost words" appearing in his head that he had never learned himself. Though disregarding the idea of JOI or any character within the novel as narrator, the "ghost words" section and this wraith ability could be meant as a metaphor to call attention to how the author's role as narrator to a character's pov is as constructed as the effect of JOI's wraith communication with Gately, a type of meta commentary on the inability to depict authentic thought.]
So the existence of wraiths would explain the random appearances of objects around ETA, which are generally assumed to be caused by the wraith of JOI. This is supported by JOI's erratic behavior when speaking with Gately, where he reappears with random objects to show Gately that he can affect real objects and climb up walls and etc.:
"The wraith disappears again and again just as instantly reappears, now holding one of Gately's Ennet House basement flea-baggy Staff bedroom's cut-out-and-Scotch-taped celebrity photos … Again the wraith disappears and instantly reappears holding a can of Coke, with good old Coke's distinctive interwoven red and white French curls on it but alien unfamiliar Oriental-type writing on it instead of the good old words Coca-Cola and Coke … The wraith walks jerkily and overdeliberately across the floor and then up a wall, occasionally disappearing and then reappearing, sort of fluttering mistily, and ends up standing upside-down on the hospital room's drop ceiling, directly over Gately, and holds one knee to its sunken chest and starts doing what Gately would know were pirouettes if he'd ever once been exposed to ballet …" (831-832).
[What's confusing is that when JOI first appears to Gately, he claims to be "just a plain old wraith, one without any sort of grudge or agenda, just a generic garden-variety wraith" (p. 829), though he clearly shows himself to be not just a garden-variety wraith when he starts moving objects around in front of Gately, contradicting his own definition that garden-variety wraiths "couldn't ordinarily affect anybody or anything solid", unless these were supposedly non-ordinary circumstances. Also, if he was the one behind all the object moving at ETA, then it seems like he must have some sort of agenda to go through all that effort. He was probably downplaying his motivations and abilities if he was able to move those objects and everything at ETA (though it's possible he had help from Lyle).]
The object appearances at ETA may just seem like random occurrences, but if we assume they're caused by JOI for some reason and not necessarily just for fun, then there could be an explanation for each occurrence (though this is also going to assume that the character of the wraith has agency and doesn't just function as a literary symbol, which is probably unlikely). This is pretty much all going to be conjecture, but suppose that JOI was still interested in how ETA or his family were doing and wanted to affect them in benevolent ways. Starting with the camera tripod that shows up early on, that could've been placed there as a gift for Mario due to their shared interest in filming:
"[U.S.S. Millicent] had come upon a Husky Vl-brand telescoping tripod, new and dully silvery-looking and set up on its three legs, right in the middle of the thicket. For no visible reason and with no footprints or visible evidence of path-beating anywhere around except the U.S.S. Millicent's own." (122).
Maybe the fact that it only showed up to Millicent first and somewhere out of the way was an attempt to help Mario out by getting him to talk with a girl that liked him. Then it later appearing directly in front of Mario, Millicent, & Hal when they walk back could be just a straightforward attempt at giving it to Mario:
"… it was when the three of them were walking together back up the hillside toward the tree-line's lip, not trying to do anything but get back to Comm.-Ad. by the most direct route in the dark, that they stumbled upon the cinematic tripod, a dully glinting TL waffle-tipped Husky, in the middle of what wasn't such a very tall or thick thicket at all." (126).
The other random occurrences are discussed during the lunch scene at ETA:
"… there's dinette sets in the tunnels and acoustic tiles in the halls and lawn-mowers in the kitchen and tripods in the grass and squeegees on the wall and Stice's bed moves around, and there's a ball machine in the girls' lockers, Longley reports, that for this kind of tuition none of this stuff the staff can get around to cleaning up bef—" (632).
Those specific occurrences are considered in greater detail as well:
"The Husky VI tripod of Mario's near-fatal encounter with the U.S.S. Millicent Kent was only the beginning. Starting with the mysterious and continuing fall of acoustic ceiling-tiles from their places in the subdorms' drop ceilings, inanimate objects have either been moved into or just out of nowhere appearing in wildly inappropriate places around E.T.A. for the past couple months in a steadily accelerating and troubling cycle. Last week a grounds-crew lawnmower sitting clean and silent and somehow menacing in the middle of the dawn kitchen gave Mrs. Clarke the fantods and resulted in Eggplant Parmesan for two suppers in a row, which sent shock waves. Yesterday A.M. there'd been a cannonesque ball machine — no small feat to move around anywhere or get through doors — in the Females' Sauna, which machine some of the upperclass girls had found and screamed at when they went in for the dawn saunas that help alleviate some vague female-type problem that none of the guys quite fathom. And two black girls on the breakfast crew reportedly found a set of squeegees on the dining hall's north wall, several meters up and hung crossed in a kind of saltire, placed there by parties unknown. F. D. V. Harde's A.M. groundsmen reportedly took the things down, and now they're leaning by the fireplace. The inappropriate found objects have had a tektitic and sinister aspect: none of the cheery odor of regular pranksterism; they're not funny … Unmentioned is the fact that Schacht and Tall Paul Shaw at lunch went over the whole part of the north wall the black girls said they found the squeegees on and could find neither nails nor holes from nails, as in no visible means of attachment." (632).
And there's a brief mention of some other occurrences during the tunnel exploration scene:
"Plus hamster-incursions could be posited to account for the occult appearance of large and incongruous E.T.A. objects in inappropriate places, which started in August with the thousands of practice balls found scattered all over the blue lobby carpeting and the carefully arranged pyramid of AminoPal energy bars found on Court 6 at dawn drills in mid-September and has gained momentum in a way no one cares for one bit …" (671).
Some of the items seem related to the management of ETA, so it's possible they were put there to indicate that they should clean up ETA more (lawnmower, squeegees) or practice more (practice balls, cannonseque ball machine) if JOI still felt some level of ownership over ETA and cared about how it was run. Or it could just be some generic unnerving haunting to show that he was displeased with the state of things [As in like Hamlet, "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark" - or ETA in this case; JOI could still take issue with Avril & C.T. running the place, similar to the way King Hamlet's ghost viewed Claudius & Gertrude].
About the "dinette sets in the tunnels," since JOI's old film lab was also down in the tunnels, this could be an indication that he spends most of his time as a wraith there if he's bringing down furniture to sit around in. Similar to the tripod incident, the "pyramid of AminoPal energy bars" seems to be done for Hal's benefit, since eating them was a habit of his ("A couple of us remarked how Hal wasn't eating the usual customary Snickers bar or AminoPal." (p. 966)).
For the ceiling tiles falling down, this seems related to Pemulis's stash of drugs hidden in a sneaker between ceiling panels (first mentioned, p. 216), so it could have been done as a warning to get rid of the drugs up until the day that Hal & Pemulis were meant to take the DMZ where instead of just dropping the ceiling tiles, the drugs were removed entirely:
"Entrepot-bound, twitchy-eyed and checking both sides behind him as he comes, rounding the curve of Subdormitory B's hall with his stick and little solid frustum-shaped stool, Michael Pemulis sees at least eight panels of the drop-ceiling have somehow fallen out of their aluminum struts and are on the floor — some broken in that incomplete, hingey way stuff with fabric-content gets broken — including the relevant panel. No old sneaker is in evidence on the floor as he clears the panels to plant the stool, his incredibly potent Bentley-Phelps penlight in his teeth, looking up into the darkness of the struts' lattice." (916).
[It doesn't exactly say that the sneaker containing the drugs was taken in that passage, but from Pemulis's last appearance in the novel ("Michael Pemulis was nowhere to be seen since early this A.M., at which time Anton Doucette said he'd seen Pemulis quote 'lurking' out by the West House dumpsters looking quote 'anxiously depressed.'" (p. 965)), it's pretty clear that Pemulis is out looking for the missing drugs.]
As for Stice's bed moving around, it's not clear what purpose this would serve, but it could be connected to the chapter from JOI's history where he helps his father move an old bed around (maybe JOI is trying to teach Stice something, similar to how he had an epiphany during that memory as a kid). This is most likely related to the other strange occurrences happening around Stice, concerning his tennis abilities:
"Summoning the sort of coercive reverence he'd felt this P.M. as several balls' sudden anomalous swerves against wind and their own vectors half convinced Stice they'd become sensitive to his inner will, at crucial times. He'd mishit one cross-court volley and seen the thing head for an area wide even of the doubles sideline and then curve like a drenched spitter back to land just inside the singles corner, and this at a time when the grounds' pines behind Hal Incandenza were breeze-leaning in the exact opposite direction. Hal had given Stice a little bit of a look on that one. Stice couldn't finally tell whether Hal noticed anything amiss in the mysterious curves and downdrafts that seemed to favor The Darkness alone …" (637).
Stice believes these effects are because "he's been somehow selected or chosen to get haunted or possessed by some kind of beneficiary or guardian ghost that resides in and/or manifests in ordinary physical objects, that wants to teach The Darkness how to not underestimate ordinary objects and raise his game to like a supernatural level, to help his game", but Hal replies that it could be to "hurt somebody else's" (p. 943).
Considering that JOI is shown to be most concerned about the condition of his youngest son during his conversation with Gately, and the fact that Ortho Stice is most likely Hal's greatest competition in being the best tennis player at ETA (once John Wayne is out of the picture), seeing that Hal is potentially facing him in the finals of the Whataburger in the Year of Glad which may decide his future as a pro-tennis player or not, it's probably that if the strange things happening around Stice are due to JOI's influence, then he's doing it to bring down Hal's game, like Hal theorizes. The reason for doing so would be connected to JOI's fear of Hal becoming a figurant, that he believes Hal does tennis to please the authority figures around him, not that he's doing so because of his own interests; as in that JOI wants Hal to stop doing tennis and become his own self (which would also reflect how JOI had those same expectations of being good at tennis placed on him by his father, but was more interested in pursuing other things (like lenses/annulation), such that JOI sees Hal as similar to his younger self and wants to prevent the same thing from happening).
It's possible that Stice is affecting these objects himself, but considering Lyle's "do not underestimate objects" discussion with him (p. 394), it seems like Lyle implies that the objects themselves are the source of the movement rather than Stice, which would more support wraiths as the cause. There's also the incident with Stice's head getting stuck to the window, which doesn't seem like something Stice would inflict on himself (though it's also confusing why JOI would do this; maybe as an attempt to get someone to remain in the same place for a long time, since that seems necessary for a wraith to communicate with a living person).
[There's also the possibility that Lyle is pulling a prank on Stice (or JOI on Lyle's behalf), due to Stice's treatment of him in the past: "He says he knows too well he'd neglected Lyle's advice about the pull-down station two years back, and regrets it. He wholeheartedly apologizes for the time last spring he got Struck and Axford to distract Lyle and then Krazy-Glued Lyle's left buttock's Spandex to the wooden top of the towel dispenser. Stice says he realizes he's the last guy with any right to come to Lyle cap in hand after all the cracks about the diet and hairstyle and all." (p. 395), but this seems inconsistent with Lyle's character as a genial unaffected guru.]
This seems to be the extent of the object appearances around ETA, though also if JOI is assumed to have full knowledge of what's going on around ETA and wherever else (based on his description of wraith abilities), wouldn't he also be able to remove the master copy of the Entertainment before anyone else gets it? He could be the one to get to the Entertainment first, though it seems like he did nothing to prevent the other copies of the Entertainment from being shown so it's possible that he wouldn't care enough.
Aside from JOI's wraith and Lyle, there are a few other mentions of wraith appearances. JOI used to see his father's ghost according to Hal:
"Himself allegedly used to see his father's ghost on stairways sometimes, but then again toward the end he used to see black-widow spiders in his hair, too, and claimed I wasn't speaking sometimes when I was sitting right there speaking to him. So we kind of wrote it all off." (870).
Mario alleges to have seen ghosts, though most likely this would be JOI himself:
"And good old Mario says he's seen paranormal figures, and he's not kidding, and Mario doesn't lie" (871).
Lucien Antitoi also appears to become a wraith after his death:
"… as he finally sheds his body's suit, Lucien finds his gut and throat again and newly whole, clean and unimpeded, and is free, catapulted home over fans and the Convexity's glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world's well-known tongues." (488-489).
Other than that, it's possible that anyone noted to have died in the narrative could have become a wraith, but if not mentioned, then they're most likely not relevant to the plot.
Lyle is shown to be a wraith when he appears to Gately in the hospital alongside JOI's wraith:
"The wraith is back, right by the bed, dressed like before and blurred at the edges in the hat-shadowed spill of hallway-light, and except now with him is another, younger, way more physically fit wraith in kind of faggy biking shorts and a U.S. tank top who's leaning way over Gately's railing and … fucking licking Gately's forehead with a rough little tongue, and as Gately reflexively strikes out at the guy's map — no man put his tongue on D. W. Gately and lived — he has just enough time to realize the wraith's breath has no warmth to it, or smell, before both wraiths vanish …" (933).
This is also supported by his overall weird behavior such as always sitting in the same place above ETA's weight room towel dispenser, licking the sweat off of people, and levitating at one point:
"Lyle hovers cross-legged just a couple mm. above the top of the towel dispenser in the unlit weight room, eyes rolled up white, lips barely moving and making no sound." (700).
Lyle seems to be not just the "garden variety" type of wraith that JOI's wraith mentions since he is well-known by everyone at ETA and can touch objects & speak to people, enough that it seems suspect that he even is a wraith (though even if he wasn't, it's undeniable that he at least has wraith abilities since he visits Gately and disappears).
It's also implied that Lyle was the old head trainer of ETA that died in a sauna incident during the story of Barry Loach coming to work at ETA:
"… B. Loach, even w/o an official B.A., being given an Asst. Trainer's job at E.T.A., a job he was promoted from just months later when the then-Head Trainer suffered the terrible accident that resulted in all locks being taken off E.T.A. saunas' doors and the saunas' maximum temperature being hard-wired down to no more than 50°C." (971).
[The timeline for this is a bit contradictory. It was said that Mario was "only fourteen" when he first meets Barry Loach, which would place the year at Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar and right around the time his dad dies, but also that during this time "his father was filming something that involved actors dressed up as God and the Devil playing poker with Tarot cards for the soul of Cosgrove Watt" (p. 971), which sounds like the filming of "Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell", dated as B.S. (Ft. 24, p. 988). This could be just a mistake in Mario's age or because of the unreliability of the section, which was supposed to be an example of what an older ETA student would recount/embellish to younger students about the Loach origin story (this section also began with first-person narration, either meant to be from Axford's pov, who is the only upperclassman not mentioned in the section, or from a younger/unknown student meant to represent the general ETA student population).
It's more likely that this occurred in B.S. and Mario was a younger age (<12), since this would line up with the mythical perception of Lyle during the time of Clipperton's suicide in the Year of the Whopper:
"… reports of Lyle's appearance outside the weight room upright and walking across the grounds have spread and caused enormous excitement and student-snapshots …" (433).]
Lyle being the old head trainer of ETA is also supported by his description in his introduction:
"His advice on conditioning and injury-prevention tends to be pretty solid, is the consensus." (128).
As well as something Orin says that implies that Lyle was different during Hal's time at ETA compared to his own:
"'Lyle said all that? That doesn't sound like Lyle.'
…
'The Lyle my class knew wasn't a how-to-deliver-the-goods-to-authorities-type figure.'" (255).
It also makes sense that Lyle would end up at ETA through being offered a job, since he was originally friends with JOI who had a history of offering ETA teaching positions to previous friends/people who helped with his films (p. 188). Some quotes of JOI's history with Lyle:
Hal's POV: "… Himself took an entire year off to drink Wild Turkey and watch broadcast-television tycoon-operas like Lorimar's Dynasty et al. in a remote spa off Canada's Northwest coast, where he supposedly met and bonded with Lyle, now of the E.T.A. weight room." (706).
Orin's interview: "The Academy wasn't even a twinkle in anybody's eye. The Stork would disappear periodically when money came in. I think he kept going back up to Lyle in Ontario. Call me age ten." (Ft. 234, p. 1041).
If it's to be believed that Lyle was alive during Orin's time at ETA, but died before Clipperton's suicide in the Year of the Whopper, Lyle must have died sometime between 2000-2002 (Year of the Whopper), since Orin would have graduated from ETA at around 2000/2001, which makes Lyle's time working at ETA pretty short since it was founded in 1998 (p. 63).
This might be one of the more controversial theories, but I think Gately dies at the end and comes back as a wraith. Mostly because it seems like the scene with Hal & Gately digging up JOI's head must happen pretty soon after the end of the book, since the AFR are closing in on the Entertainment's location with the ETA invasion and Orin's technical interview, and there doesn't seem to enough time for Gately to recover enough to be able to dig, since Hal & him are attempting to retrieve the Entertainment before anyone else gets to it.
Gately's shoulder injury would've likely taken more than a month to heal if it was going to heal, since the injury sounded pretty serious:
"Thrust said whatever that Nuck that the residents allege shot him shot him with was serious ordnance, because there'd been bits of Gately's shoulder and bowling shirt all over the complex's little street. Thrust pointed at the huge bandage and asked whether they'd talked to Gately yet about was he going to get to keep what was left of the mutilated shoulder and arm." (823).
But in Gately's dream about Hal & him digging up JOI's head, "he's eating with both hands" and "the sad kid is trying to scream at Gately … to start digging the guy's head up before it's too late" (p. 934), which makes it seem like he has full control of both his arms (& that Hal believes it as well; also corroborated by Hal: "Donald Gately and I dig up my father's head" (p. 17)). It wouldn't make sense for Gately to be digging so soon after sustaining an injury that bad, but this wouldn't matter if he was a wraith – though he would have to be not just a garden-variety wraith but one that could affect real objects like Lyle.
Also, in Gately's dream, the part where he gets too hungry to dig seems exaggeratedly unreal:
"Gately's the best digger but he's wicked hungry, like irresistibly hungry, and he's eating with both hands out of huge economy-size bags of corporate snacks so he can't really dig …" (934).
But if Gately were a wraith, this could be a result of the same wraith limitations that cause Lyle to need to lick the sweat off of students before giving them advice, as in that there's something that prevents wraiths from being able to interact with the real world without some aspect of sustenance.
There's also the aspect of Hal being unable to talk in Gately's dream, but somehow Gately understands what he's trying to say:
"… the sad kid is trying to scream at Gately that the important thing was buried in the guy's head and to divert the Continental Emergency to start digging the guy's head up before it's too late, but the kid moves his mouth but nothing comes out …" (934).
This would make sense if Gately was a wraith, since he would be able to hear Hal's thoughts directed at him with the internal brain communication thing that wraiths do.
[One thing that had always bothered me about the Hal, Gately, & John Wayne trip to dig up JOI's head is that supposedly this occurs after Hal's one and only trip to the emergency room, which is assumed to be due to his condition that renders him incomprehensible. If Hal was incomprehensible by that point, how would he then get Gately and John Wayne to go with him or even be able to cooperate with them if they were working together? There is the possibility that Hal's condition was slow acting and that he was able to retain some ability to communicate during the early stages of their meeting, which is somewhat supported by Gately's dream, since he seems to be mute and not completely insane seeming – but still, it seems like if Hal was mute then he would still be unable to communicate. And yet, it seems like Hal was perceived as insane during his first hospitalization due to his assumptions of how he would be treated in the Emergency Room following the college admissions incident, which was only based off the one visit:
"I will be conveyed to an Emergency Room of some kind, where I will be detained as long as I do not respond to questions, and then, when I do respond to questions, I will be sedated …" (16).
Also, his condition had at least manifested by 12/12, less than a month later, shown through his abysmal scores from the Board tests (see Q4), which doesn't give Gately enough time to heal to make the journey before Hal becomes unable to communicate, assuming Gately survives his injury. It seems like Hal would need to have some way to communicate with John Wayne and Gately in order to plan and make the journey, which would be possible if Gately was a wraith, and would somewhat explain his presence there if he was the only one able to communicate with Hal.]
The presence of Joelle in Gately's dream, "Joelle van D. appears with wings and no underwear and asks if they knew him, the dead guy with the head" (p. 934), could also be explained if Joelle had died (perhaps from being captured by the AFR or from watching the copies of the Entertainment at Ennet House) and Gately alone as a wraith could be able to perceive her incorporeal body being there. Though personally, I don't care for the idea that Joelle dies, mostly because there's no other evidence to back it up; I see this aspect of the dream as more of an interference from Gately's previous dreams about her.
Gately dying and turning into a wraith, possibly particularly one with better abilities to interact with the living world, could explain why he was visited by the wraiths of JOI & Lyle in the hospital; JOI's intention could have been to teach Gately things about being a wraith and then induce Gately to help his son, which JOI as a self-described "garden-variety" wraith wouldn't be able to do. Also, considering the implications about wraith visitations, from the O.E.D. (Hal's dictionary of choice, p. 29), one of the definitions of "wraith" includes a part about its appearance as a signifier of a person's death:
"b. An immaterial or spectral appearance of a living being, frequently regarded as portending that person's death; a fetch." [link].
The definition isn't really any kind of evidence, but it does seem somewhat incompatible with reality for Gately to receive prophetic dreams about Hal or the Entertainment and then continue to live life normally having it confirmed that ghosts are real and with supernatural knowledge about the future – though it is possible he could just assume he hallucinated the whole thing.
The better indication of Gately's death would be the passages surrounding his condition and injury. From the start of the fight that results in him getting shot, a good amount of description was used to show that the gun Gately was shot with would cause serious damage:
"And the Item — if the guy trig-pulls on some resident that resident's going down — the Item's some customized version of a U.S. .44 Bulldog Special, or maybe a Nuck or Brazilian clone, blunt and ugly and with a bore like the mouth of a cave… The piece's been modified, Gately can appraise. The barrel's been vented out near the muzzle to cut your Bulldog's infamous recoil, the hammer's bobbed, and the thing's got a fat Mag Na Port or -clone grip like the metro Finest favor. This is not a weekend-warrior or liquor-store-holdup type Item; it's one that's made real specifically for putting projectiles into people. It's not a semiauto but is throated for a fucking speed-loader, which Gately can't see if the guy's got a speed-loader under the loose floral shirt but needs to assume the guy's got near-unlimited shots with a speed-loader. The North Shore Finest on the other hand wrap their grips in this like colored gauze that wicks sweat. Gately tries to recall a past associate's insufferable ammo-lectures when under the influence — your Bulldog and clones can take anything from light target loads and wadcutter to Colt SofTip dum-dums and worse. He's pretty sure this thing could put him down with one round; he's not sure." (610).
After he gets injured, Gately's R.N. mentions that a bullet fragment could have gotten lodged in his Trachea, since there was damage to the muscles in his neck, so they had him intubated to prevent Gately from coughing up blood essentially:
"What Gately can get from what she says to Dr. Pressburger is that there'd been concern that Gately might have got a fragment of whatever projectile he got invaded with in, through, or near his lower-something Trachea, since there'd been trauma to his Something-with-six-syllables-that-started-with-Sterno, she said the radiology results were indefinite but suspicious, and somebody called Pendleton had wanted a 16 mm. siphuncular nebulizer dispensing 4 ml. of 20% Mucomyst q. 2 h. on the off-chance of hemorrhage or mucoidal flux, like just in case." (921).
[Sternocleidomastoid = largest muscle in the neck; q. 2 h. = medical abbreviation for 'every 2 hours']
However, Gately's M.D. disagrees with the practice of intubation for Gately's condition and says it would exacerbate Gately's injuries:
"He paces squeakily at the foot of the bed watching the R.N. turn the screws the right way and pushes his owlish glasses up and says that Clifford Pendleton, scratch golfer or no, is a post-traumatic maroon, that nebulized Mucomyst is for (and here his voice makes it clear he's reciting from memory, like to show off) abnormal, viscid, or inspissated post-traumatic mucus, not potential hemorrhaging or edema, and that 16 mm. siphuncular intubation itself had been specifically discreditated as an intratracheal-edema prophylaxis in the second-to-latest issue of Morbid Trauma Quarterly as so diametrically invasive that it was more apt to exacerbate than to alleviate hemoptysis, according to somebody he calls 'Laird' or 'Layered.'" (921).
It isn't clear from their conversation how lethal Gately's injuries are, but in Gately's last scene with him awake in the hospital, his condition starts getting worse and the medical personnel around him seem uncertain about how to resolve it:
"An R.N. felt his forehead and yanked her hand back with a yelp … Gately felt physically hotter than he'd ever felt. It felt like a sun in his head … The M.D. that looked age twelve appeared with others wreathed in mist and said Up it to 30 q 2 and Let's Try Doris, that the poor son of a bitch was burning down. He wasn't talking to Gately … Somebody else said Ice Bath. Gately felt something rough and cool on his face. A voice that sounded like his own brainvoice with an echo said to never try and pull a weight that exceeds you. Gately figured he might die. It wasn't calm and peaceful like alleged. It was more like trying to pull something heavier than you." (972-973).
There is one part in particular that could be an indication of his death:
"Somebody overhead asked somebody else if they were ready, and somebody commented on the size of Gately's head and gripped Gately's head, and then he felt an upward movement deep inside that was so personal and horrible he woke up." (974).
However it isn't confirmed by the end if Gately really dies or not; whether or not the end of the novel is Gately reliving his past right before he dies, he stays within his past memories for the rest of it, including the last sentence:
"And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out." (981).
This scene is referenced earlier during Gately's conversation with JOI's wraith:
"This is the only time he's ever been struck dumb except for a brief but nasty bout of pleuritic laryngitis he'd had when he was twenty-four and sleeping on the cold beach up in Gloucester …" (833)
[This lines up with the timeline of Gately's life: "At twenty-four he'd done 17 months at Billerica for assaulting two bouncers in a nightclub" (p. 463), and right before the bouncer incident was the whole business with Fackelmann and Pamela Hoffman-Jeep, "Gately, for several months before he did his State assault-bit, was disastrously involved with one Pamela Hoffman-Jeep …" (p. 924). So it sounds like after Fackelmann died, Gately was dumped on the beach.
But disregarding the actual chronology of this scene preceding Gately going to jail and continuing his drug use, the imagery of the last line implies rebirth, which would apply towards the current Don Gately, given its place in the novel. The beach imagery of the last line also connects back to Gately's childhood memories, particularly the beach house he lived in as a toddler ("When Don was a massive toddler his mother had put them in a little beach house just back of the dunes off a public beach in Beverly." (p. 809)), which he has a dream about during his time in the hospital:
"He fever-dreamed of dark writhing storm clouds writhing darkly and screaming on down the beach at Beverly MA … Gately ran across the beach to the water to escape the tornado. He ran through the crazed breakers to deep warm water and submerged himself and stayed under until he ran out of breath. It was now no longer clear if he was little Bimmy or the grown man Don. He kept coming up briefly for a great sucking breath and then going back under where it was warm and still …" (816).
Gately also has similar dreams involving the ocean earlier in the novel when he first starts reliving his childhood memories that he repressed with drug use:
"And his dreams late that night, after the Braintree/Bob Death Commitment, seem to set him under a sort of sea, at terrific depths, the water all around him silent and dim and the same temperature he is." (449).
The difference between the earlier dreams and the last line also supports the idea of rebirth, as Gately is initially depicted as staying within a womb-like ocean while still repressing his worst memories, then being out on the sand & far from the tide after remembering it all and reliving his Bottom.]
In the end, it's all really unclear, so if the idea that Gately dies & is a wraith is too unbelievable, then I'll try to come up with an explanation where Gately lives and all logical inconsistencies are resolved:
Since Gately's dream is just a dream and not representative of reality, most of the stranger aspects can be ignored as dream imagery or just seen as symbolic. Then say that they dig up JOI's head at least a month later from the end of the novel so that Gately's shoulder is healed enough and that Hal must have had some way to communicate with Gately & John Wayne, maybe through the help of the wraiths, Lyle or JOI, or maybe through writing if Hal could still write legibly early on (though this goes against what was implied in the college admissions section in the Year of Glad, it's not exactly directly contradicted). Even considering the aspect of urgency from the dream, maybe the AFR takes a long time to plan or figure out where the Entertainment is & leaves the rest of the Incandenzas alone, or that John Wayne didn't have much information about the AFR's plans such that it takes Hal et al. a long time to figure out the importance of the Entertainment themselves.
Personally, I prefer the idea of Gately being a wraith because it would explain a lot of things that initially seemed confusing to me, but there still are scenarios where Gately lives, which may be preferable to most.
It's generally accepted that JOI committed suicide by microwave, but there were several aspects of his life that were implied to be contributing factors to his suicide, the main ones being his wife's infidelity, his alcoholism, or the Entertainment.
Considering Avril's affairs, the incident with the name on the car window is mentioned to have a significant impact on her and JOI's marriage, occurring not long before his death:
"… Jim and Avril hadn't been intimate with each other, i.e. conjugally, for quite some time, though Jim hadn't known the precise reason why Avril was so sanguine about their not being intimate until the incident with the Volvo, where apparently Avril had been with someone (Orin would not say who or whether he knew who) in the Volvo and had idly — and disastrously, whether w/ unconscious intent or not — and presumably post-coitally idly written the person's first name in the steam of the steamed-up car window, which name had disappeared with the steam but had reappeared the next time the window had steamed up, which had been when James had been driving to this very brownstone, to shoot Joelle in the weird wobble-lensed maternal 'I'm-so-terribly-sorry' monologue-scene of the last thing he'd done, and then never shown her …" (Ft. 80, p. 999).
This incident is once again mentioned by Marlon Bain in his correspondence with Steeply, told to him by his sister who learned it from Orin:
"… some incident occurred in the Incandenzas' Volvo involving one of the windows and a word — all I am given is that O. reports that in the days prior to Dr. Incandenza's felo de se, a so-called "word" appeared on a "fogged" "window" of Mrs. Inc's pale yellow Volvo, and the word cast a conjugal pall in all sorts of directions." (Ft. 269, p. 1048).
The mystery of whoever's name was written on the car window is never revealed, but clearly it had to have been someone significant, since the time frame implies it to be a reason for JOI's suicide; I'd narrow it down to a few names, but just for the sake of being thorough I'll list out all the known affairs Avril had, though most seem not applicable in the car window incident.
[From Hal's POV, he is aware of the following affairs: John Wayne, C.T., "Bain, graduate students, grammatical colleagues, Japanese fight-choreographers, the hairy-shouldered Ken N. Johnson, the Islamic M.D. Himself had found so especially torturing" (957).
There also seems to be a euphemistic phrase used for her affairs, as in from Bain's perspective: "a sort of swarthily foreign-looking monilial-internist medical resident Mrs. Inc had introduced as a so-called "dear and cherished friend"" (Ft. 269, p. 1049), referring to the medical attache. Other instances with similar phrasing: from Orin's mold story: "Mr. Reehagen next door, who was so-called "friends" with her" (Ft. 234, p. 1044), also from the same Orin interview: "Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts, which she co-founded with a couple quote cherished academic friends" (Ft. 234, p. 1039), "... the Mnemonic Verbal Inventory designed by a dear and trusted colleague of the Moms at Brandeis" (p. 317), and "E.T.A.'s original architect, Avril's old and very dear friend, the topology world's closed-curve-mapping-Übermensch A.Y. ('Vector-Field') Rickey of Brandeis U., now deceased" (Ft. 3, p. 983).
Along with the DuPlessis & Luria liaison (see Q8), JOI also accuses Avril of "maternal … assignations with a certain unnamed bisexual bassoonist in the Albertan Secret Guard's tactical-bands unit" and "cavortings with not one not two but over thirty Near Eastern medical attaches" in the Professional Conversationalist section (p. 30).
(Though it is unclear how true JOI's claims are in that section due to his madness. The line about the thirty Near Eastern medical attaches in particular strikes me as an exaggerated claim that uses the medical attache as a synecdoche for the rest of Avril's affairs, as in he conflates all of them to be medical attaches.)]
Since JOI is aware of or at least has suspicions of Avril's infidelity at least a year before the car window incident (which is also reflected in his filmography, ex: "Various Small Flames" published Before Subsidization being about "a man (Watt) sitting in a dark bedroom drinking bourbon while his wife (Heath) and an Amway representative (Johnson) have acrobatic coitus in the background's lit hallway" (Ft. 24, p. 988)), it seems like the names of any particular one of Avril's affairs would not have been significant enough to seriously affect their marriage, unless it was someone JOI knew personally.
Whether Avril had an affair with them or not, the only ones that plausibly may have upset JOI significantly are the medical attache, Marlon Bain, C.T., or Orin:
There isn't much significant about the medical attache except that he somehow upset JOI more than usual, according to Hal. However, he isn't in the U.S. for the right time frame of the incident, since during YDAU it's mentioned that he was gone for 8 years (JOI's suicide happened about 4 years before YDAU): "The attache's medical practice being normally divided between Montreal and the Rub' al Khali, it is his first trip back to U.S.A. soil since completing his residency eight years ago." (p. 33).
Marlon Bain is a kind of stand-in for Orin, so the implication of Avril's affair with him could have upset JOI to a similar degree. However, Bain also doesn't seem to be in the area during this time, since he is described by Orin to never leave the house due to OCD (Ft. 234, p. 1043), and in his letter to Steeply he mentions becoming a shut in at the age of 17: "These Disabilities led to my departure from the Enfield Tennis Academy at 17, prior to graduation, and my withdrawal from competitive junior tennis and contemporary life as we know it." (Ft. 269, p. 1047). Since he was Orin's age, his affair with Avril was similar to the John Wayne situation if it happened, and not around the time of JOI's death.
In all likelihood it's either Orin or C.T., and it's ambiguous enough that a strong case can be made for either of them.
For Orin, it's possible that he could've been sexually abused by Avril at a young age, as theorized by Molly Notkin:
"… his widow-to-be was engaging in sexual enmeshments with just about everything with a Y-chromosome, and had been for what sounded like many years, including possibly with the Auteur's son and Madame's craven lover, as a child, seeing as it sounded like the little rotter had enough malcathected issues with his mother to keep all of Vienna humming briskly for quite some time." (791).
Though there isn't much else to support this except for the inconclusive evidence of reading some of his behaviors as indications of past abuse, such as his issues with women, his refusal to be in contact with Avril as an adult, and that at the age of 15, "What poor old O. claimed to have found so moving was Himself's assumption that O. was still cherry." (p. 956). Whether this happened or not, Avril could have had a recent affair with him and wrote his name (or Avril's personal nickname for him, "Filbert" (Ft. 110, p. 1006)) on the car window.
[Orin's name being on his family's car window may not seem that strange or suspicious, even assuming Avril wrote it, since it could be attributed to something innocent like motherly concern. However an argument can be made that JOI was aware that any name written on the window was done in a sexual context, since Avril had previously used the car for her affairs often:
"Orin alleged in Y.T.M.P. that when he took the Moms's car in the morning he sometimes observed the smeared prints of nude human feet on the inside of the windshield." (899).
Along with JOI's invention of the smudge-proof glass, pretty much implied to be a result of his distress over his wife's infidelity:
"… and also came up with that new kind of window glass that doesn't fog or smudge from people touching it or breathing on it and drawing little finger-oil faces on it" (Ft. 234, p. 1038).
Also, though this is connected only thematically and doesn't really support anything, the wording in one of the lines in Avril's letter to Orin is reminiscent of the name on the car window incident:
"I recall pressing the maternal beak to the terminal window's glass, trying to make my Filbert out somewhere behind the airplane's impossible little bullethole windows." (Ft. 110, p. 1006).]
There's also the fact that Orin was the one that had known about the name on the car glass incident and had told people about it, but then doesn't seem to be in the area during the time of JOI's suicide less than 90 days later and/or is purposely avoiding his family, given that he later questions Hal for information on ETA and what was happening right around the time of JOI's suicide (pp. 247-250) in a way that sounds as though he hadn't been around for months; for example, only knowing info about his dad from Joelle's calls:
"He quit drinking in January, Hal. It was something Joelle was real specific about. She called even after we'd agreed not to call and told me about it even after I said I didn't want to hear about him if she was going to still be in his things." (249).
It would make sense for Orin to want to avoid his family around then and not attend his dad's funeral if he thought himself partially responsible for the issues in his parent's marriage and then his dad's suicide. It also makes sense for him to later blame Avril entirely and refuse to talk to her again afterwards. Though on the other hand, his issues with his family could be explained by him resenting his father for using Joelle in his films and then blaming his mother for his dad's suicide due to the affairs she had.
While Orin is the most shocking and suicide-worthy option, personally I don't believe that they actually had a sexual relationship, mostly because the way Orin talks about his mother doesn't seem consistent with them having a secret affair. For one, it's weird that he would spread around the rumors of his mother's affairs in the car if he was also a participant; it sounds like he's coming from an outsider perspective finding out something odd happened. Also, when he does complain about his mother in one of Steeply's interviews, his main complaints are centered around her obsessively controlling nature and behaviors, not any explicit action she did towards him. It sounds like he had spent a lot of time reflecting on how her past behaviors affected him negatively and was trying to pinpoint what exactly was the main issue, not that he was trying to get over a specifically traumatic event.
[Also, there's the possibility that the name written on the car window wasn't the same as the person Avril was having an affair with, in which case any name listed previously is possible. If this was the case, Orin/Filbert becomes more plausible, since it's clear Avril struggled with incestual feelings for him that she projected onto John Wayne or Marlon Bain. There's also an argument to be made for the medical attache, since his name is never revealed much like the name on the glass.]
Other than that, C.T. is the obvious answer based on the amount of times Avril's affair with him is hinted at in the book. For example, Orin brings up their affair right from the start when asking Hal about JOI's suicide, implying that he considers it to be a related factor:
"'For example the Stork took himself down before C.T. moved in upstairs at HmH? or after?'
…
'Immediately before. Two, three days before. C.T. had had what's now deLint's room, next to Schtitt's, in Comm.-Ad.'
'And Dad knew they were … ?'
'Very close? I don't know, O.'
'You don't know?'" (247).
JOI also did not seen to like C.T. very much:
"… in the car up to Enfield Mario's uncle would keep up an Opheliac mad monologue of chatter that would get Himself's poor teeth grinding so bad that when they pulled over to the breakdown lane and Mario came around to open the door and let Himself lean out and be ill there'd be grit in the throw-up that came out, white dental visible grit, from all the grinding." (Ft. 316, p. 1062).
Though it's not as bad as if it were Orin, C.T.'s relationship with Avril would have been off-putting due to it's incestual nature. Even though he was just her step-brother and said to be not related to Avril by blood (p. 900), it still appears like incest (and C.T.'s father was unknown so it's also possible they had the same dad) and makes JOI look exceptionally cucked, since C.T. had moved in with them and taken over most of the functions at ETA, essentially replacing JOI in every way. JOI may have also realized that C.T. was the actual father of Mario if he hadn't already figured it out.
[If not clear, Mario closely resembles the description of Tavis's mother (p. 901), and the line about his birth, "The first birth of the Incandenzas' second son was a surprise" (p. 312), implies that there was a second birth of a second son, Hal's birth, which then implies that only Orin and Hal are JOI's biological sons.
There's also the theory that none of the Incandenza children are actually JOI's biological sons, with Hal being the medical attache's son and Orin being the result of one of Avril's other affairs, but I don't find this theory that convincing. It mostly relies on the idea that Hal has darker skin than the rest of his family and had an interest in Byzantine erotica similar to the medical attache, but interests aren't determined by genetics (Hal could have been influenced by the medical attache's interest in it if he was around Avril at the time), and it was also said that JOI looked ethnic in a similar way to Hal:
"The name handed down paternally from an Umbrian five generations past and now much diluted by N.E. Yankee, a great-grandmother with Pima-tribe Indian S.W. blood, and Canadian cross-breeding, Hal is the only extant Incandenza who looks in any way ethnic. His late father had been as a young man darkly tall, high flat Pima-tribe cheekbones and very black hair Brylcreemed back so tight there'd been a kind of enforced widow's peak. Himself had looked ethnic, but he isn't extant." (101).
Also, the way JOI's wraith describes Hal indicates that he considers him to be his biological son:
"… he, the wraith, when alive in the world of animate men, had seen his own personal youngest offspring, a son, the one most like him, the one most marvelous and frightening to him, becoming a figurant, toward the end." (837).]
Another good reason to believe it was C.T. was because of the half-drunken Wild Turkey bottle found near his body after his suicide, first mentioned by Hal to Orin:
"'And there was a large and half-full bottle of Wild Turkey found on the counter not far away, with a large red decorative giftwrappish bow on the neck.'" (250).
This bottle was also described in detail by Molly Notkin along with her suspicions of the culprit, though her account shouldn't be that trustworthy due to her distance from the event itself:
"That it did not strike her, Molly Notkin, as improbable that the special limited-edition turkey-shaped gift bottle of Wild Turkey Blended Whiskey-brand distilled spirits with the cerise velveteen gift-ribbon around its neck with the bow tucked under its wattles on the kitchen counter next to the microwave oven before which the Auteur's body had been found so ghastlyly inclined had been placed there by the spouse's widow-to-be — who may well have been enraged by the fact that the Auteur had never been willing to give up spirits quote 'for her' but had apparently been willing to give them up quote 'for' Madame Psychosis and her nude appearance in his final opus." (790).
Due to the close proximity to the name on the car window incident, it's possible that the bottle of alcohol was sent in an attempt to murder or more likely just incapacitate JOI by getting him addicted again, so that JOI wouldn't cause any problems after finding out about the affair. In this case, C.T. has the strongest motive to send the bottle, since he has the most to lose/gain from JOI concerning his position at ETA:
"It is known that, during the last five years of his life, Dr. James O. Incandenza liquidated his assets and patent-licenses, ceded control over most of the Enfield Tennis Academy's operations to his wife's half-brother …" (64).
If C.T. felt threatened that JOI would take away his de facto position as headmaster and kick him out of ETA, it doesn't seem improbable that he would do something drastic, since he was shown to be an extremely anxious man who definitely sounded like he wanted the position of headmaster based on the speech where he gave multiple reasons why it couldn't be Avril instead (p. 288). [C.T. being the culprit would also parallel Hamlet with King Claudius's murder of King Hamlet, though instead of poison to the ear, it was the alcohol indirectly getting JOI to commit suicide from his previous issues with addiction.]
The only other person that would have a reasonable motive to send the bottle would be Avril, since she was dissatisfied with their marriage and said to have been happier after he died in a conversation between Hal & Mario:
"'Hey Hal, did the Moms seem like she got happier after Himself passed away, to you?'
'…'
'It seems like she got happier. She seems even taller. She stopped travelling everywhere all the time for this and that thing. The corporate-grammar thing. The library-protest thing.'" (41-42).
However I don't find the theory that it was Avril very compelling since her life wouldn't have been significantly changed or benefitted much from his death (they never argued; she was already cheating on him). [It also wouldn't line up with the parallels to Hamlet, since she represents Gertrude who isn't shown to be directly involved with the murder of King Hamlet.]
Similarly with Orin, it's unlikely to be him since there's no reasonable motivation for why he would send the bottle, though he does say this about the incident:
"'The late Stork was the victim of the most monstrous practical joke ever played, in my opinion, is all I'll say.'" (Ft. 234, p. 1041).
It's possible that the bottle could have been sent unrelatedly as a gift by someone who wasn't aware of JOI's sobriety and alcoholism issues. For example, the medical attache, who wasn't in the area and couldn't have known about JOI's sobriety, could've sent it as a gift for Avril/the family, which would parallel how he later got sent a gift that led to his death on the same date (April 1st). It's also possible JOI just bought the alcohol for himself. But since there's not much evidence around the bottle's origins and considering all the parallels to Hamlet, I would say it makes most sense to assume it was C.T. who sent it.
[This is also kind of a long shot theory that I don't even believe, but potentially Joelle could have sent him the bottle as a kind of celebratory gift after he finished the Entertainment, signifying that since she was done appearing in his films, he could go back to being an alcoholic like he wanted. If this was true, it would give greater context to Joelle's guilt over JOI's death & the progression of her addiction issues, and would explain why Molly Notkin knows so much about the Wild Turkey bottle & placement even though she would have only heard the information from Joelle, who didn't even show up at the funeral (nor Orin), so it's questionable how Joelle knew about that detail in the first place. However, I would dismiss this idea since it doesn't line up with Joelle's thoughts in chapters of her POV, since she questions if the Entertainment or her making him stay sober was what killed JOI, which doesn't seem consistent with the scenario of her sending him the bottle.
There's also the theory that someone else (namely C.T.) directly killed JOI by microwaving his head and planted the bottle of alcohol to make it look like a suicide, which would greater parallel Hamlet, but there's not any textual evidence to support this. JOI's wrath doesn't mention anything about someone having killed him, and the text implies that he did commit suicide with the microwave:
"Hal Incandenza, though he has no idea yet of why his father really put his head in a specially-dickied microwave in the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, is pretty sure that it wasn't because of standard U.S. anhedonia." (694).]
However JOI obtained the bottle, I think the themes of the text would support that his struggle with alcoholism and the issues underlying his addiction were the reasons why he committed suicide, but there's also the possibility the Entertainment contributed to the decline of his mental state that led him to do it.
According to Hal's account of JOI's actions during his last month, there were two instances where he left ETA that could have been related to the Entertainment:
"'… Himself was down in that little post-production closet off the lab for like a solid month. Mario'd bring food and … essentials down. Sometimes he'd eat with Lyle. I don't think he came up to ground level for at least a month, except for just one trip out to Belmont to McLean's for a two-day purge and detox. This was about a week after he came back. He'd flown off somewhere for three days, for what the impression I get was work-related business. Film-related. If Lyle didn't go with him Lyle went somewhere, because he wasn't in the weight room. I know Mario didn't go with him and didn't know what was up. Mario doesn't lie. It was unclear whether he'd finished whatever he was editing. Himself I mean. He stopped living on April First, if you weren't sure, was the day. I can tell you on April First he wasn't back by the time P.M. matches started, because I'd been around the lab door right after lunch and he wasn't back.'
'He went in for another detox you say. In what, March?'
'The Moms herself emerged and risked exterior transit and took him herself, so I gather it was urgent.'" (249).
The way this is phrased is a bit confusing to me, but I believe the sequence of events is that JOI first left ETA for a detox trip sometime in March due to Avril, then a week later he left again for a film-related trip, potentially with Lyle, and when he returned from that, he committed suicide.
Since we know that the Entertainment was completed enough to successfully paralyze people, I would assume that the film-related trip had to do with JOI finishing the film and potentially making copies/putting it to cartridges. Then the fact that he committed suicide immediately after completing the film indicates that it was a large contributing factor, which without considering any unnatural effects of the film itself, I would guess was possibly because he was in a state of depression or anhedonia from succeeding in making a perfectly entertaining thing but in a way that failed to accomplish his original goal for it, according to his conversation with Gately:
"His last resort: entertainment. Make something so bloody compelling it would reverse thrust on a young self's fall into the womb of solipsism, anhedonia, death in life." (839).
[Considering that JOI didn't suffer the same fate as the others who watched the film, I would guess that the reason he wasn't killed from making the Entertainment was that the complete effect of the Entertainment most likely relied on the method used to transcribe it to cartridge, as in adding in effects of holography, etc. (see Q14 for more speculation), which would mean that JOI had to have refrained from viewing the complete film via cartridge.]
Though it's also possible that the effect of producing/editing the Entertainment was affecting JOI mentally. The first trip where Avril took him out to get detoxed could be due to an outward perception of his madness getting worse from the Entertainment decreasing his sanity, since he was supposedly still sober during this time.
[JOI's sobriety during the full 3 months is supported by what his wraith tells Gately:
"The wraith feels along his long jaw and says he spent the whole sober last ninety days of his animate life working tirelessly to contrive a medium via which he and the muted son could simply converse." (838).
However, soon after that, he rephrases his claim to being only sober for 89 days, implying that he did drink the bottle of Wild Turkey on the day of his suicide:
"He'd been sober as a Mennonite quilter for 89 days, at the very tail-end of his life, the wraith avers …" (839).]
Based on the wraith's claims to Gately, it seems like the trip to get detoxed was a result of Avril assuming his madness concerning his perception of Hal was due to alcohol consumption:
"The wraith says almost bitterly that when he'd stand up and wave his arms for them all to attend to the fact that his youngest and most promising son was disappearing, they'd thought all his agitation meant was that he had gone bats from Wild Turkey-intake and needed to try to get sober, again, one more time." (838).
Though if that were the case, it doesn't seem particularly unusual for JOI to believe that something was wrong with Hal based on previous instances of his claims (Professional Conversationalist conversation), so it's possible that was a result of his normal madness and not him being affected by the Entertainment.
So going over all of the evidence, it's still unclear what exactly drove JOI to suicide, but I'll give my interpretation of it. JOI's suicide was due to a combination of things; recently it was made clear that his wife was replacing him with someone that was disturbing to him (in my opinion it was C.T.), his last resort at finding a way to communicate with his son failed (he completed the Entertainment and found it to be a failure), and he knew he was just going to decline into a life of alcoholism after he drank the whiskey, which also got him into the state of mind to kill himself.
Most of the information on what copies exist comes from the perspective of Rodney Tine in early Nov. YDAU, described in pgs. 548-549. The read-only cartridges started showing up in summer YDPAH (previous year from YDAU) from the U.S. perspective as mentioned by Tine:
"Tine's in metro Boston because of the N.S. implications of what they'd first come to Unspecified Services about two summers past, both the head of D.E.A. and the Chair of the Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences …" (548).
All the relevant information Tine knows about the copies is listed in the following quote:
"It had popped up in Berkeley NCA, in the home of a film-scholar and his male companion, neither of whom had appeared for appointments for days; and now lost to meaningful human activity henceforward … The Entertainment had popped up in New Iberia LA. Tempe AZ had lost two-thirds of the attendees of an avant-garde film festival in Arizona State U.'s Entertainment Studies amphitheater before a level-headed custodian killed the building's whole grid. J. Gentle had been apprised about the thing only after it had popped up and taken out a diplomatically immune Near Eastern medical attache and a dozen incidentals here in Boston MA late last spring … The Berkeley cartridge had vanished from an S.F.P.D. Evidence Room an electron-microscopy toss of which had revealed flannel fibers … Three members of the Academy of D.A.S. had received unlabelled copies in the mail, and the one who'd actually sat down to have a look now needed a receptacle under his chin at all times. Reports of the thing popping up yet again in metro Boston MA remain unsubstantiated. Tine's been dispatched here in part to coordinate substantiation. The Tempe and New Iberia cartridges are in custody, vaulted." (548-549).
So in summary, we have 1). Berkeley copy (stolen by Canadians), 2). New Iberia copy (vaulted by U.S.), 3). Tempe copy (vaulted by U.S.), 4). Boston medical attache copy (?), and 5). 6). 7). the 3 Academy of D.A.S. copies (?). [? = unknown location but likely under U.S. control.]
Outside of that, we know that the AFR finds a copy, traced from the burglary of DuPlessis to the Antitois, so that would be an 8th copy.
[Just for clarity's sake, I'll list all relevant information to show how the cartridge got from DuPlessis to the Antitoi shop.
First, the cartridge is robbed from DuPlessis by Gately & his associate Kite in Autumn YDPAH. During the burglary process, it is noted that along with other valuables, they had taken some film cartridges:
"[promoted silverware is piled] On top of the seascape safe's more negotiable contents, themselves on top of an unplugged and head-parked and absolutely top-hole genuine InterLace state-of-the-art TP/viewer ensemble in a multishelved hardwood rollable like entertainment-system-console thing, with a cartridge-dock and double-head drive in a compartment underneath with doors with classy little brass maple-leaf knob things and several shelves crammed tight with upscale arty-looking film cartridges, which latter Don Gately's colleague just about drooled all over the parquet flooring at the potential discriminating-type-fence-value of, potentially, if they were rare or celluloid-transferred or not available on the InterLace Dissemination Grid." (Ft. 18, p. 985).
The description is a bit confusing, but essentially DuPlessis had the cartridge stored along with his other film cartridges inside the same cabinet-like thing that also contained his TP/viewer (TV equivalent).
Gately's associate Kite keeps the film cartridges for himself, but then at some point sells the Entertainment cartridge to Sixties Bob when he runs out of money for drugs, as implied in this description from Gately's memories:
"Dr. Robert ('Sixties Bob') Monroe — the septuagenarian pink-sunglasses-and-Nehru-jacket-wearing N.C.-F.P.F. ergotic-vascular-headache-treatment specialized, … an inveterate collector and haggling trader of shit, sometimes took Kite along on little expeditions of eclectic and seedy shops for Dead-related paraphernalia, sometimes even informally fencing stuff for Kite (and so indirectly Gately), covering Kite with $ when Kite's rigid need-schedule didn't permit a more formal and time-consuming fence, Sixties Bob then trading the merchandise around various seedy locales for 60s-related shit nobody else'd even usually want." (927).
Sixties Bob then shows up at the Antitoi shop and sells them the DMZ tablets as well as a bag of cartridges (one of which being the copy of the Entertainment), as described from Lucien Antitoi's POV:
"Bertraund had actually been credulous enough with a wrinkled long-haired person of advanced years in a paisley Nehru jacket also of great age and a puzzling cap with a skeleton playing at the violin emblazoned upon it, on the front, wearing also the most stupid-appearing small round wire spectacles with salmon-colored lenses, and also continually forming the letter of V with fingers of his hand and directing this letter of V at Bertraund and Lucien … Bertraund had been starry-eyed enough to agree to barter the person an antique blue lava-lamp and a lavender-tinged apothecary's mirror for eighteen unexceptional-looking and old lozenges the longhaired old person had claimed in a jumble of West-Swiss-accented French were 650 mg. of a trop-formidable harmful pharmaceutical no longer available and guaranteed to make one's most hair-raising psychedelic experience look like a day on the massage-tables of a Basel hot-springs resort, throwing in as well a kitchen-can waste bag filled with crusty old mossy boot-and-leg Read-Only cartridges, sans any labels, that appeared to have been stored in a person's rear yard and then run through a gaseous dryer of clothes …" (481).
The AFR tortures Kite then Sixties Bob to find out that DuPlessis's copy of the Entertainment had been sold to the Antitois:
"Having traced — through the strenuous technical interview of the sartorially eccentric cranio-facial-pain-specialist, whom they had traced through the regrettably fatal technical interview of the young burglar whose electrical-surge-tolerance proved considerably lower than that of his room's computer's machinery — having traced their best chances at a copy to the hapless Antitois' establishment, it had taken the A.F.R. then several days to find it there, the real Entertainment." (721).
Then the AFR finds the Entertainment copy in the waste bag that Sixties Bob gave the Antitois (this passage occurs right before the two AFR characters mentioned are paralyzed):
"The cell's young Desjardins had been taking his turn in the viewing rotation, seated with young Tassigny in the room of storage during the hours of early morning, sampling the dregs of unshelved entertainments found in kitchen-can waste bags in the same closet the Antitois' cadavers were swelling within." (725).]
There are also multiple copies theorized to be in Canadian possession by Steeply in his conversation with Marathe:
"'Whether or not the A.F.R. ever even recover this alleged Master copy from the DuPlessis burglary,' Steeply said quietly; 'still, you guys have a Read-Only copy, at least one, you've told us, no?'
'Yes.'
'Nobody has this mysterious Master, but we've all got Read-Only's — all the anti-O.N.A.N. cells have at least one Read-Only, we're pretty sure.'
Marathe said, 'M. Brullîme, he tells Fortier he thinks the CPCP of Alberta do not have any copy.'" (489).
However Steeply's claim does not seem to be that reliable, since we know that Marathe is lying about having a copy (unless he's speaking for Canada as a whole) because this conversation occurs on 30 April/1 May YDAU and the AFR doesn't have a copy of their own until Nov YDAU, implied in this passage after the DuPlessis copy is found:
"Philosophical, Fortier reminded the A.F.R. that they did now encouragingly know the Entertainment of such power did truly exist, for themselves, and could thus gird their courage and fortitude for the more indirect task of forfeiting hopes of securing a Master copy and instead striving to secure the original Master, the auteur's own cartridge, from which all Read-Only copies had presumably been copied." (725).
Steeply could be right and the other anti-ONAN cells (see Q16 for the list) not including the AFR could each have their own copies, but this is unconfirmed. The only thing that seems definitive is that the Berkeley copy that was implied to be stolen by Canadians was taken by the FLQ, which explains how they knew about the Entertainment & its packaging and made fake displays to mock the AFR's desperation to get their hands on a copy:
"Quickly, on the first day, in a liquor box which was damp and smelled, they had found an example of the rival F.L.Q.'s tactical street-display cartridges, with its crudely stamped smiling face and the 'IL NE FAUT PLUS QU'ON PURSUIVE LE BONHEUR' embossed upon it … Then the cartridge of the street-display turned out to be blank, void … he and Marathe had counselled all along that the F.L.Q. displays of the Entertainment and the wheelchaired man were probably the hoax, instilling of terror only. The fact of the displays which featured wheelchairs, a smack to the testicles of A.F.R. — this was ignored." (722).
[Regarding the packaging, there is a difference between the copy sent to the medical attache and the fake FLQ copies. The medical attache's copy has the smiling face, but not the French words of the FLQ copies, as seen when the medical attache first obtains the copy:
"The padded mailer is postmarked suburban Phoenix area in Arizona U.S.A., and the return address box has only the term 'HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!,' with a small drawn crude face, smiling, in ballpoint ink, instead of a return address or incorporated logo. … the item inside, which is merely a standard black entertainment cartridge, but is wholly unlabelled and not in any sort of colorful or informative or inviting cartridge-case, and has only another of these vapid U.S.A.-type circular smiling heads embossed upon it where the registration- and duration-codes are supposed to be embossed." (36).
This could've implied that the words were just invented by the FLQ for their fake copies if not for the fact that the real Entertainment copy found by the AFR did have the same words on it:
"Then, by the time Fortier was able to return to the dismantled shop, they had located a third cartridge emblazed with the embossed smile and letters disclaiming need of happy pursuit, and, after some regretful losses, they had secured and verified it, the samizdat cartridge of Entertainment burglared from the death of DuPlessis." (724).
So the French saying could've originally been written on copies that were sent out – just not to the medical attache – (which still would pretty much confirm that the FLQ had their hands on a copy at some point since they knew about the phrase), but there also is the possibility that the FLQ added those words themselves and that the copy the AFR receives was originally from the FLQ, who had given it to DuPlessis – or DuPlessis could've added the words as well to his own copy. This could account for the reason why the attache's copy didn't have the phrase but the ones related to the FLQ did; it also makes sense for the FLQ to add the words, since an inclusion of a French saying makes it seem more politically motivated, as in involved with Quebec Separatism, even though the Entertainment was supposed to be just an American film/not politically motivated; it seems more believable that the phrase would have come from a Separatist group perhaps as a scare tactic.]
Since the FLQ had the copy of the Entertainment, it makes sense that the AFR (and potentially other Canadian anti-ONAN groups) would be informed about it as well, due to DuPlessis's relationship as liaison between the FLQ and other anti-ONAN groups, as mentioned in his death scene:
"And the bound, wheezing, acetate-clad Canadian — the right-hand man to probably the most infamous anti-O.N.A.N. organizer north of the Great Concavity, the lieutenant and trouble-shooting trusted adviser who selflessly volunteered to move with his family to the savagely American area of metro Boston to act as liaison between and general leash-holder for the half-dozen or so malevolent and mutually antagonistic groups of Québecer Separatists and Albertan ultra-rightists united only in their fanatical conviction that the U.S.A.'s Experialistic 'gift' or 'return' of the so-calledly 'Reconfigured' Great Convexity to its northern neighbor and O.N.A.N. ally constituted an intolerable blow to Canadian sovereignty, honor, and hygiene …" (58-59).
[One thing that might be confusing is how the FLQ knew about the Entertainment in the first place. The most likely source of info is Luria P., who could've been informed about it from Rodney Tine, who is supposedly betraying his country for her:
"(Rodney Tine, Sr., Chief of Unspecified Services, acknowledged architect of O.N.A.N. and continental Reconfiguration, who held the ear of the White House of U.S.A., and whose stenographer had long doubled as the stenographer-cum-jeune-fille-deVendredi of M. DuPlessis, former asst. coordinator of the pan-Canadian Resistance, and whose passionate, ill-disguised attachment (Tine's) to this double-amaneunsis — one Mile. Luria Perec, of Lamartine, county L'Islet, Quebec — gave rise to these questions of the high-level loyalties of Tine, whether he 'doubled' for Quebec out of the love for Luria or 'tripled' the loyalties, pretending only to divulge secrets while secretly maintaining his U.S.A. fealty against the pull of an irresistible love, it was said.)" (92).
Then since Luria P. is also DuPlessis's stenographer, the sequence of events could potentially be: the USOUS find out about the Entertainment from the Boston incident -> Rodney Tine tells Luria about it-> Luria tells this to DuPlessis -> DuPlessis orders the FLQ to steal the Boston copy (or just informs them about it and they go steal it themselves). This would also explain why if DuPlessis received a copy of the Entertainment, he would've known not to play it (and also would have bought many blank tapes to try to copy it). Although there's also the possibility that the FLQ-stolen copy was given to DuPlessis such that he never received a copy in the mail at all and only possessed the Canadians' one and only copy, so that the Berkeley copy and the AFR's copy ended up being the same one.]
So, supposedly the other anti-ONAN cells did know about the Entertainment – though it's difficult to see how they could have possessed a copy when the AFR didn't even acquire one until Nov YDAU, and they were supposed to be the most feared Separatist group. Given the lack of textual evidence, I would guess that Steeply is wrong about most anti-ONAN cells having a copy and say that only the AFR and likely the FLQ have a copy.
The last potential copies of the Entertainment are seen by Marathe at Ennet House, in the cabinet in the back office when he interviews with Pat Montesian in order to find Joelle:
"Among the small-of-font titles such as Focal Length Parameters X-XL and Drop Volley Ex. II were two cases of plain brown plastic, blank, except for — … except maybe for tiny round faces of embossed smiles upon the brown cases." (750).
[For clarity's sake again, I'll list all relevant information to show how the cartridges got there.
The cartridges are found in the tunnels by younger ETA students on clean-up duty and are sent to be thrown out:
"One whole box on its side with its frayed strapping tape split has spilled part of a load of old TP-cartridges, old and mostly unlabelled, out onto the tunnel floor in a fannish pattern, and Gopnik and Peterson complain that the cartridge-cases' sharp edges put holes in their Glad bags, and Blott is dispatched with three bags of cartridges and fruit rinds, each only about half full, back to the lit vestibule outside the Comm.-Ad. tunnel's start, where a serious pile of bags is starting to pile fragrantly up." (670).
Clenette, who works as a custodian for ETA while staying in Ennet House, is noticed by Hal in C.T.'s office while he waits to discuss the Eschaton incident (p. 527), and is later seen leaving ETA with some items, during the scene where the ETA students eat dinner:
"The black girl Clenette Hal had read fear in as she left C.T.'s office with his litter now has a bulging backpack on her back, as in bulging maybe with dumpster-pilferage …" (633-634).
She is confirmed to have taken the cartridges before they are thrown out, bringing them with her to Ennet House, as described by Calvin Thrust to Gately in the hospital:
"The biggest issue at the House Bitch and Complaint meeting was that earlier this week it turns out Clenette H. had brung in this whole humongous shitload of cartridges she said they were getting ready to throw in the dumpster up at the swank tennis school up the hill she works at, and she promoted them and hauled them down to the House …" (825).]
Since these tapes came from the ETA tunnels, which were connected to the place where JOI could've potentially made copies of the Entertainment: "… Dr. James Incandenza's old optics and editing facilities are down here off one of the main tunnels …" (667), and were found near what appears to be the microwave that JOI used to kill himself: "Chu has Blott see whether he can lift a bulky old doorless microwave oven that's lying on its side up next to one wall …" (670), there is a non zero possibility that these could be actual copies of the Entertainment, most likely originating from JOI's lab and moved to the tunnels for storage after he died.
[If these tapes are believed to be copies of the Entertainment, then this strongly supports the idea that JOI made the copies himself, since if anyone other than him decided to make copies of the Master with the intention to distribute, why would they then leave those copies abandoned in the ETA tunnels? It seems most likely that the tapes were part of the collection of JOI's old things that were tossed out and stored in the tunnels, as indicated with the inclusion of the doorless microwave.]
These tapes were still at Ennet House when Marathe left and it's left unclear where they ended up (see Q14 for consideration of what happens to them).
So then, we have 1). Berkeley copy (stolen by FLQ), 2). New Iberia copy (vaulted by U.S.), 3). Tempe copy (vaulted by U.S.), 4). Boston medical attache copy (?), 5). 6). 7). the 3 Academy of D.A.S. copies (?), 8). DuPlessis copy (found by the AFR), 9). 10). Ennet House copies (?).
[? = unknown location but likely under U.S. control.]
Marathe either keeps the information to himself and the tapes/supposed Entertainment copies are still at the Ennet House, or he tells Steeply about them and the USOUS removes them. We know that the AFR does not have them because we when return back to the AFR POV on Nov 19 (5 days after Marathe visits Ennet House), no mention is made about any new tapes (or Joelle, so Marathe betrays the AFR completely):
"After Rémy Marathe and Ossowiecke, and Balbalis also, they all reported back negatively for all signs of this veiled performer, M. Fortier and Marathe threw into an effect this finally most drastic of the operations for the locating of the Master Entertainment." (845).
However, there is an issue with the USOUS actually going through with removing the tapes, which Marathe notes when considering which side to inform:
"But Steeply, before committing to overt action, will wish for confirmation that those in the cabinet were items of the true Entertainment, not the blank and joking F.L.Q. displays." (751).
This does seem to be the case, since it takes the USOUS multiple days to interview Joelle from the time that Marathe notifies them (assuming Marathe notifies them the same day, Nov 14, the interview with Joelle happens on Nov 20 – the date is not exactly stated but can be inferred from Joelle's descriptions of the weather (p. 958) that are similar to Hal's POV of the blizzard on Nov 20 (e.g. the trains closing early, visibility bad)).
But if the USOUS took so long to get there, how come Johnette didn't watch the Entertainment copy and paralyze herself/anyone else in Ennet House, since she was ordered to watch them by Pat Montesian (Ennet House Director) in this conversation:
"'So can you just run them through after lights-out, as many as you can, check and make sure they're appropriate?' … 'As many as you can get through, and leave them on Janice's desk, and I'll have her put them out at the start of the day-shift tomorrow.' … 'They're in the cabinet with the intakes,' the authority told her.
'I'll watch them during Dream Duty, as many as there's time.'" (754).
It seems like she had to have gotten to the tapes if they were still there, since she had spent the last 5 nights working Dream Duty when she meets Hal on Nov 17:
"In Don Gately's medical absence, Johnette F. had worked five straight night shifts on Dream Duty and was in the front office just after 0830 writing up the previous night in the Log …" (785).
But nothing bad has happened to her or the rest of Ennet House. Truly the most likely solution is that Marathe missaw and the tapes were just some other generic harmless cartridges. Or maybe she just hadn't gotten to them. However there is another possibility, that the tapes were actual copies of the Entertainment, but didn't work in this particular case, because of the same reason that had been previously established with the Antitoi brothers:
Consider the situation where the Antitoi brothers received the DuPlessis copy of the Entertainment; wasn't it strange that they were both unharmed even though Lucien Antitoi was supposed to view every cartridge that was sold to them:
"… Lucien's in charge of inventory and order. Nevertheless, once he's viewed it even once, he can identify any used cartridge in stock and will point it out to the rare customer with the sharpened whitewood tip of his homemade broom." (483).
He did in fact view the tapes in the bag that contained the stolen copy of the Entertainment from DuPlessis (see Q13 for how it got there), which he thinks about after viewing the FLQ street cartridges, also found to be blank:
"[FLQ street cartridges]—each was stamped also with a circle and arc that resembled a disembodied smile, which made Lucien himself smile and pop them in right away, to find to his disappointment and impatience with Bertraund that they were blank, without even HD static, just as the old rude person's bartered tapes he had removed from the waste bag of their storage for viewing had proved, blank beyond static, to the satisfaction of Lucien's disgust." (483).
This passage was partially set up in order to make it ambiguous whether the tape was the master copy and unable to be played on a normal viewer, but since we know that it was not, how is it that he was able to watch it without being affected?
Well, one answer is that he tried playing multiple tapes, saw that they were blank and assumed the rest were as well, putting them aside without playing the copy of the Entertainment. But I think the more interesting theory and what's hinted at in the text, is that the Entertainment can only be played on the types of TP viewers that have high definition setups or are undamaged, otherwise the Entertainment just shows up as blank. This is implied by the difference in TP viewers between the Antitois and the AFR:
During the sequence describing Lucien Antitoi's process of viewing cartridges, their TP viewer is described as broken or damaged in some way:
"The viewer's screen has something wrong with its Definition and there is a wobble that makes all cartridge performers on the left section of it appear to have Tourette's syndrome." (483).
This was also particularly noted by the AFR, who went out to buy their own viewer, which was later used to view the Entertainment copy that paralyzed some of their members:
"Because the viewer of the shop was visually dysfunctional, a consumer TP had been purchased and set up for volunteer viewing in the room of storage off the shop's back room." (722).
If it's true that the difference in lethality of the two viewings was due to the difference in resolution of the TP viewer, then this means that the Entertainment's effects are not just dependent on the content, but on the way the film is projected, which is also theorized in a conversation between Marathe and Steeply where Steeply attributes the effects to holography:
"'The filmmaker'd been a cutting-edge optics man. Holography, diffraction. He'd used holography a couple times before, and in the context of a kind of filmed assault on the viewer. He was of the Hostile School or some such shit.'
'Also a maker of reflecting panels for thermal weapons, and an important Annulateur, also, and amasser of the capital from opticals, before hostility and film,' Marathe said.
Steeply embraced himself. 'Tom Flatto's personal theory is the appeal's got something to do with density. The visual compulsion. Theory's that with a really sophisticated piece of holography you'd get the neural density of an actual stage play without losing the selective realism of the viewer-screen. That the density plus the realism might be too much to take. Dick Desai in Data Production wants to go in with ALGOL and see if there are Fourier Equations in the root code's ALGOL, which would signify holo-grammatical activity going on.'" (490-491).
This theory seems applicable, since it's related to JOI's research and depends on the viewer-screen interface. JOI had used holography previously in a few of his films, mainly "The Medusa v. the Odalisque":
"Viz. at the allusion to the supposed samizdateur's anticonfluential and meta-entertainmentish and hologram-intensive Medusa-v.-Odalisque thing, which in fact the play-within-film fight-scene part can be broken down into a series of what are called 'Fast Fourier Transforms' …" (Ft. 223, p. 1036).
[Hal also had written an essay about this that he submitted in his college application, "The Implications of Post-Fourier Transformations for a Holographically Mimetic Cinema" (p. 7), which gives this theory more significance in the text at least.]
In JOI's filmography, the description of the film "The Machine in the Ghost: Annular Holography for Fun and Prophet" connects JOI's main topics of research with the application of holography and implies the use of high resolution for this method:
"Nontechnical introduction to theories of annular enhancement and zone-plating and their applications in high-resolution laser holography" (Ft. 24, p. 988).
[Interestingly or not, one of the first things the ETA tennis players talk about in the locker room scene has to do with resolution in TP viewers, from the question about the difference between a "broadcast TV set and a cartridge-capable TP":
"'The Cathodeluminescent Panel. No cathode gun. No phosphenic screen. Two to the screen's diagonal width in cm. lines of resolution, total.'
'You mean a high-def. viewer in general, or a specifically TP-component viewer?'
…
'Next item. Next like flash-card. Define acutance. Anybody?'
'A measure of resolution directly proportional to the resolved ratio of a given pulse's digital code,' Hal says." (96-97).]
I'd say that there's enough weight given to the topics of high definition resolution and holography in the text to imply that those are factors in the effect of the Entertainment, though of course this is still just an unprovable theory.
[And here's another unprovable theory for you: what if the Entertainment was only effective once a high definition method of viewing was developed, as in exactly what was advertised in "Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile (sic)" (223). We know that according to the USOUS, the Entertainment only started showing up the year after, in YDPAH (see Q13), so maybe the development of mimetic resolution was a main factor in making the Entertainment lethal… Ok I'll stop here, this part is just a joke.]
So back at Ennet House, there's one main TP viewer in the living room which is often described as old, e.g. "Ennet House's old D.E.C. TP cartridge-viewer" (202). [There's one in the back office as well, also described as old: "Pat M. or the House Manager will let you use the back office's old TP to order one if you put up a sustained enough squawk" (202).] There's also a passage that implies that it's somewhat damaged:
"Kate Gompert and Geoffrey Day and Ken Erdedy and Bruce Green are in the living room with the lights mostly out and the old jumpy-picture D.E.C. viewer on." (648).
If it's true that the Entertainment cannot be played on certain TP viewers due to issues in resolution or screen damage, then it's possible that the Ennet House TP viewer, being old and damaged, would not be able to play the Entertainment copies if those tapes really were actual copies. This theory is contingent on so many things that it seems reasonably unlikely, but this might have been what DFW was going for, at least for the reason why the Antitoi brothers weren't affected by the Entertainment.
So my answer to the actual question would be that if the tapes are real copies, they are either still at the Ennet House, potentially unable to be played correctly on their viewer and momentarily useless, or the USOUS has them. I like to believe that the USOUS got to them.
Near the end of the novel, Hal looks outside ETA and sees someone in the snow:
"A figure was out there, not under the shelter of the pavilion but sitting in the bleachers behind the east Show Courts, leaning back with his elbows on one level and bottom on the next and feet stretched out below, not moving, wearing what seemed to be puffy and bright enough to be a coat, but getting buried by snow, just sitting there. It was impossible to tell the person's age or sex." (867).
Though it is an unsolved mystery, I don't think there really is anything that meaningful to be gained if the person's identity were revealed, since it doesn't really connect to anything in the plot or say much about a person's character. I initially interpreted it as an environmental detail of ETA, similar to how it's mentioned that Mario sees two girls practicing tennis through the window in Schitt's room (p. 755) or how Hal hears some kid crying in the dorms (p. 864), though the person sitting outside in the snow is more intriguing because it's more of a mystery.
Personally, I like the theory that it is Thierry Poutrincourt because she had previously worn a bright coat (?) ("she wore white sneakers and a Donnay Warmup of deep glowing neutron blue" (p. 674)) and looks more masculine in appearance according to Steeply ("She looked more male than anything" (p. 675)), which is close to the description of the figure. It also makes more sense for her to be out there than other characters, considering that if she was an AFR spy, she would know that the AFR were invading ETA that day and would want to avoid being in the school at that moment (implied by how she is noted to have gone missing that morning (p. 965)).
This will probably be the least interesting section, but I'll go over each group's appearances in the text. Here's the list of all the known anti-ONAN/Separatist groups:
— Le Front de la Libération de la Québec (Q, S, VV)
— Le Parti Québecois (Q, S, E)" (144).
"Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents" are the AFR, the main villains in the text. Their leader is M. Fortier, with notable members M. Broullîme and Remy Marathe. They are seen stalking Orin in Phoenix, Arizona and spying on the FLQ house in Allston, but their main location is the Antitois shop once they invade it to find the DuPlessis copy of the Entertainment in Nov YDAU. They have a routing dissemination-scheme somewhere in Arizona (Steeply to Marathe: "Postal codes route the package through the desert Southwest, and we know your dissemination-scheme's routing mechanism is proposed for somewhere between Phoenix and the border down here." (90)) and are implied to have many connections elsewhere (e.g. sources at M.I.T. and at home in the Papineau region, spies at ETA (p. 726)). They originate from The Cult of the Next Train, where sons of Quebec miners would compete to be the last one to jump across the path of an incoming train and often end up with injuries that killed or paralyzed them: "… that several among the La Culte du Prochain Train's survivors and organizational directorate went on to found and comprise Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents is beyond sociohistorical dispute …" (Ft. 304, p. 1061).
"Le Bloc Québecois" are described as "the ultra right anti-Reconfigurative vishnu of the Bloc Quebecois" (Ft. 304, p. 1057) and are closely related to "Le Parti Québecois"; from Hal's Separatist studies: "Apparently the Parti Q. is provincial, intra-Québecois; the Bloc's its federal counterpart, w/ members in Parliament …" (Ft. 109, p. 1004). Not much is mentioned about either of those groups, though Bloc was used as an example to show how the AFR assassinate officials with differing ideology: "newly elected Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe … heard the squeak last night during a spontaneously disseminated address …" (Ft. 304, p. 1057).
The "Calgarian Pro-Canadian Phalanx" are the "CPCP of Alberta" (p. 489) and are mainly referred to as "the Albertans," which are said to be "ultra-rightists" by Steeply (p. 420) and "all crazy inside their head" by Marathe (p. 319). They are mentioned in passing a few times during discussions of Separatist groups, but pretty much dismissed, for example by Steeply: "'Who's worried about the Albertans? The Albertans' idea of a blow to the U.S. plexus is they blow up rangeland in Montana. They're wackos.'" (489). They are presumed not to have a copy of the Entertainment by the AFR (p. 489).
"Les Fils de Montcalm" are sometimes referred to as "Montcalmists" (p. 420) and are said to have a "relative indifference to a continental Reconfiguration" (Ft. 304, p. 1062). Some of their anti-ONAN tactics are mentioned (e.g. in Hal & Orin's Separatist phone call: "The Fils de Montcalm … Are they the ones in Spandex and pancake makeup? The giant pies dropped on Ottawa after the third Meech Lake Accord?" (Ft. 110, pp. 1012-1013)), but they aren't that relevant otherwise. They originate from the Cult of the Endless Kiss where couples would compete over who could kiss the longest before passing out: "… the evolution of northern Quebec's La Culte de Baiser Sans Fin into the not particularly dreaded but media savvy Fils de Montcalm cell credited with the helicoptered dropping of the 12 meter, human waste filled, pie shell onto the rostrum of U.S. President Gentle's second Inaugural." (Ft. 304, p. 1061).
"Les Fils de Papineau" do not seem to be mentioned in the text outside of this list, though the region of Papineau is the same area that the AFR originates from ("The soon to be all-too-well-known and dread-inspiring Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents of the E.W.D.-receptacle-festooned Papineau region of southwestern Quebec." (Ft. 112, p. 1022)), so it's possible that they could be made up of the non-disabled boys (les fils = the sons) from the Train Cult and/or somehow connected to the AFR.
"Le Front de la Libération de la Québec" is the FLQ, the rival group to the AFR and said to be "a younger and rowdier and less implacably businesslike cell than the A.F.R., and symbolically adopting certain cultural customs, musics and motifs associated with Hawaii …" (Ft. 47, p. 995). Their base is the house that plays Hawaiian music when Randy Lenz kills their dog outside, and 3 of their members get injured and/or killed during the fight with Gately. [If this was unclear, Bruce Green identifies the house as being on Brainerd St.: "Green's close enough to see that the Hawaiianized Nuck house is 412 W. Brainerd" (p. 586) and sees the AFR there: "A first-floor light in the house across Brainerd lights up and backlights a figure in a sort of suit and metal wheelchair sitting right up next to the window …" (p. 588); the AFR confirms that they were spying on the FLQ's base on Brainerd St.: "Surveillance on the hated F.L.Q.'s bureau centrale, in the poorly disciplined house on Allston's Rue de Brainerd …" (726).] They were most likely the ones that stole the Berkeley copy of the Entertainment ("The Berkeley cartridge had vanished from an S.F.P.D. Evidence Room an electron-microscopy toss of which had revealed flannel fibers." (549)), since they made the fake "F.L.Q. displays of the Entertainment and the wheelchaired man" (722). Previous members were the Antitoi brothers, but they were "spurned by F.L.Q. after DuPlessis's assassination" (480).
[These groups are all supposedly fighting for Separatism (Quebec seceding from Canada) or against Reconfiguration (transfer of toxic U.S. territory to Canada) by way of terrorizing the U.S. (now just called ONAN = Organization of North American Nations, i.e. the U.S., Mexico, and Canada) into turning against Canada, which would then motivate Canada into Separating from Quebec. They do not work with each other because of differing ideologies and were only connected through Guillaume DuPlessis (the man who died during Gately's burglary, pp. 58-59) and possibly Luria Perec, who was DuPlessis's assistant (though DuPlessis seems to have a closer relationship with the FLQ (p. 480), and Luria with the AFR (p. 972)). Luria is also involved with the USOUS's leader, Rodney Tine, whom she is betraying for Separatist causes.]
