As Timothy Aubry, Professor of English at Baruch College, writes in a chapter of his book Reading As Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does For Middle-Class Americans called “Infinite Jest and the Recovery of Feeling,” this irresistibility is a trait of narratives of addiction in general:

“The strangely appealing opportunity to observe, imagine, or inhabit vicariously the scenes of pleasure, transgression, abjection, and redemption that these narratives typically unfold has come to function as a substitute gratification capable of replacing the substances whose addictive properties they document.”

This, as Infinite Jest’s narrator describes, is also the therapeutic method that Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) uses to build a sense of connection. Through language based on lived experiences, AA members are able to immediately “identify” (i.e. empathize) based on a “shared mode of discourse.” As Aubrey points out:

“Narratives of addiction accomplish this seemingly self- contradicting task not only by allowing members to relive, at least imaginatively, drunken dramas from their past, but also by facilitating within the meeting a visceral, indeed intoxicating form of identification between teller and listener. Thus language in AA serves not only to represent, but to produce in its moment of enunciation, the kind of “actual experience” that its members crave.”

Yet, how do these narratives of addiction operate on a general audience, people who presumably are fairly distant from the “threat of addiction”? What Aubrey argues that it is contemporary audiences’ lack of actual experience that fuels their complex craving for the kind of “cathartic emotional reaction” elicited by AA meetings:

“And the novel suggests that those to whom these strategies appeal are also precisely the ones likely to suffer from the problem that it explores: a combination of emotional detachment and cerebral sophistication — a detachment that, in turn, produces cravings for the intense sensations that substance abuse seems to offer.”

Infinite Jest is filled with well-educated, middle-class, often (very) male people who are unable to express or access their emotions. There’s Erdedy, the “yuppie marijuana addict” who cannot hug his fellow Narcotics Anonymous members. There’s also Geoffrey Day, the professor of historicity who constantly deconstructs AA to “avoid acknowledging his need for help.” James Incandenza makes avant-garde films that eschew the possibility of empathy with his characters. His son Orin is a relentless womanizer. His other son Hal mocks his grief therapist by “performing the stages of mourning, which he has studied in a textbook.”

Infinite Jest’s narrator critiques what he sees as America’s hardened cultural mask of “ironic, nonchalent posture” (which, ironically applies to the narrator himself, and he knows it) in this description of Hal:

“Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pulses and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.” (IJ, 694–95)

In Wallace’s estimation, much of the broad emotional desensitization and boredom of middle-class America is caused by overstimulation via commodities, shallow entertainment, and corporal manipulations. The habits of “compulsive, ironic self-consciousness” forces the novel’s characters to seek novel thrills in athletics, drugs, or movies. All of these forms of addictive entertainment only continue the cycle of narcissism and banality that mirror the reader’s own cravings for narrative while reading Infinite Jest.