I never intended to storyboard Infinite Jest. That's not a reasonable undertaking. I did what I always do when reading a serious novel. I grabbed my 0.5mm Rotring mechanical pencil and took cryptic tiny-font notes on auxiliary pages and in the margins. But I soon had a problem. Infinite Jest is gargantuan: there's not nearly enough note-taking space on the pages near the rear cover. So I got a companion notebook. That too didn't work because Infinite Jest' is so 'plutonium dense' that my own notes would've had to be commensurate in length with the actual novel text to adequately capture the character's nuance. So I resorted to the most compact shorthand: drawing pictures.
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I wasn't trying to map-out scenes: I was merely sketching little schematics to help me recall what happened at a glance without having to re-read bits of the chapter. Owing to the fractal structure of the novel, where the narrative constantly folds-in on itself, characters periodically reappear, but in different timeframes, in different clothes and unfamiliar surroundings, all of which are thematically important, meaning I'd have to draw each character in detail many times over. Eventually I turned to PowerPoint. If I could grab old photographs from my own albums together with images off the web, I figured I'd make a clipart library of characters and props that I could cut-and-paste from, thereby saving myself multiple hand redraws.
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But I still wasn't storyboarding at this point. My digital notes were little more than visual reminders, thrown randomly onto the page. The goal wasn't to produce anything of value that someone else might understand: they were just memory-triggers for myself. But the constant introduction of new characters in the novel together with my slow pace of reading caused me to forget key elements of the book faster than expected. So I soon changed note-taking methods. I circled back (in annular fashion) to earlier notes and reformulated them into more coherent storyboards to better capture the essence of the scene and kept that style moving forward. Although this process was time-consuming, it was never laborious. I'd read 7-10 pages in the morning, think about what I'd read all day and spend a couple hours at night making a storyboard for that scene. Even at this point, nearing page 200, I wasn't intending to storyboard the whole book. I figured I'd continue for maybe 50-100 more pages until the novel stabilized to a point where I'd know the key characters and locations well enough to not need to make visual aids for myself anymore.
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But the book never stabilized. The figurants kept being introduced to where I found it more important, not less, in later pages to construct detailed storyboards to keep track of the immense detail and to integrate (PEEMSTER) bits of information from earlier in the book. Somewhere in the midst of my mechanical note-taking process, a transformative thing happened. Making the storyboards each night wasn't just a mindless exercise in documentation, it became an archaeological excavation - a fact-finding opportunity to unearth the secrets of what Wallace really wanted to say. The book truly is structured as a Sierpinski Gasket so with each unfurling of a self-similar leaf I gained more understanding of the present scene but also learned more about what had happened in a similarly structured past. Mapping out the storyboards was like entering into a time-machine that brought me back to when Wallace was writing the book: I was in the same room with him when he was figuring out how to do it. I wasn't merely reading one-of-a-million copies of a novel that others had access to. Wallace was talking directly to me.
Reading 'Infinite Jest' in this way became a deeply moving experience. You probably won't have time to make detailed storyboards: so I put this website together in the hopes that by consulting the boards contained herein, it will help you to remember key elements of the book and revisit scenes without re-reading them, leaving you time to think about all of the thematic and symbolic aspects of the story. And hopefully, you too will find yourself in the same room with Wallace while he speaks directly to you.
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I don't claim to be an expert on the book. I've read it once. I'm sure that if I read it again I'll find hundreds of things I missed and misinterpreted. But I know what the book is about and I know it impacted me. I'm quite sure how every thread ends, as Wallace says 'to the right of frame.' Admittedly, I had to carefully re-read and re-storyboard the first 15 pages (3-17) a few times to figure this out, just as Wallace intended. As in true annular fashion, the Infinite Jest is that the beginning is the ending and the ending is the beginning.
- Aaron Buchwald