Burn identifies Gately with Heracles and his legendary twelve labors

interpreting the state of acedia in terms of its anticapitalist and Luddite potential

a multivalent noun here

[...] One resonance of Gately's DG initials is the decigram, a common measure for drug sales, the "tenth of a gram" cocaine customers beg for [...]

Thus when Hal says in the book's stark, one-line second paragraph, "I am in here" (IJ 3), rather than a statement of location, it is the cry "I EXIST," familiar from Wallace's Markson review (BF 83). I hear in this remark "I ... in-here" or "I inhere", meaning there is a substantialness to Hal's valueless self [...]

I inhere

As the analogies betwen tennis and capitaist striving mount, we imagine the E.T.A players as young workers who have difficulties--and who are systematically kept from--balancing their massive physical exertions with mental labor on the question of what all this body-work is for, the "question[] of why" (IJ 900). [...]

NAFTA, negotiated throughout the late 1980s and ratified in December 1992, is widely seen as a signature extension of the logic of neoliberalism from the Reagan-Bush years into the Clinton era. As James McCarthy writes regarding the deregulatory and antistate logic behind such agreements, "These common neoliberal prescriptions [are] contributions to an overarching goal of increasing the flexibility and profitability of capital." McCarthy also notes the dire effects of such agreements for environment regulation and health, which Wallace toys with in depicting the Great Concavity. [...]

Steeply's name also suggests the steeply sloped yield curve of returns on investments, which are often rendered in terms of mathematical function as Y(t), or yield over time--hence a "steep Y" (= Steeply?). [...]

While Infinite Jest obviously develops around analogies between addict and consumer, less obvious is the role played by slavery in defining the interface between the two. Wallace portrays the addict as one who lacks true economic agency to the point of being a slave--to being, in my terms, one who receives no value at all in return for his work. [...]

Initials continue generating meaning for Wallace here. The joke meaning of Hal's HI initials is that he is high all the time, but there is also a sacred meaning available to him, an eastern variation on his incandescence: in Japanese Buddhism, the character transliterated as "ka" or "hi" means fire, one of five elements and associated physically with body heat and mentally with passion. Gately's DG has sacred possibilities as well, for the letters point to his most important coin association, an abbreviation seen, among other places, on the obverse of the British pound: along the edge it reads, "ELIZABETH II DG REG FD." [...]

finding a limited grace means combining hard work with an essentially aleatory view of the self that is reminiscent of existentialism

inspired by Sartre's Nausea as much as Pynchon's schlemihls

the gift is, inevitably, an aporia, since it necessarily produces an exceptation of return or reimbursement

a sense of caritas underwritten by eros