‘It is often more fun to want something than to have it:’: Dystopian (Un)happiness in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest

• Alejandro Peraza Díaz ^[1]
  1. [1] Universidad de La Laguna
• Localización: Moving beyond the pandemic: English and American studies in Spain / coord. por Francisco Gallardo del Puerto, María del Carmen Camus Camus, Jesús Ángel González López, 2022, ISBN 978-84-19024-15-2, págs. 207-211
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto Completo Libro (pdf)
• Resumen

  • Infinite Jest, written by David Foster Wallace and published in 1996, is widely known for its unconventional style and broad variety of topics. Amongst them, happiness becomes a central concept that speaks to current events. The aim of this paper is to analyze the characters’ particular pursuit of happiness, drawing on some of the ideas present in the works of Sara Ahmed (2010), Lauren Berlant (2011), and Wendy Brown (2015). Special emphasis will be laid on the idea of alienation as caused by the prevailing social and political system which shapes the novel, as well as on how the expectation of happiness becomes the origin of unhappiness. These ideas will be analyzed through the teenage students and young athletes of the Enfield Tennis Academy, showing that the "very expectation of happiness as an overcoming of bad feeling is how happiness can cause unhappiness" (Ahmed, 16).