Infinite Jest: Who Is In There?

WhatABurger, 737 E Mcdowell Rd, Phoenix, AZ, April 2009

So who's narrating Infinite Jest? I can't say conclusively. But I'm looking at three possibilities or even a combination thereof.

Hal: If it is Hal, my vote would be for the Year of Glad Hal (I'm constricted here because I'm trying to avoid spoilers so I'll identify Hal by years instead of actions). Year of Depend Adult Undergarment Hal, while capable intellectually, is not yet able to observe/empathize to the level of detail as say Mario or even to the extent that Don Gately can because YDAU Hal is very caught up in being able to "deliver the goods" to those in authority, something YOG Hal is incapable of due to his biochemical issues - issues whose precise consequence makes it possible for Hal to be temporally in two or more places at the same time.*

Mario: I'd been leaning heavily towards Mario until I started writing this post and started thinking about Hal a little more clearly. I confess. The first time through IJ I was charmed by the character of Mario. Going through again though, well, there's something that's niggling me about him. The narrator tells us that Mario's physical limitations make him a "born listener." Mario basks in a narrative glow of child-like innocence and guilessness. But is this true? What is to be made of the inconsistencies between what we're told about Mario w/r/t his capabilities and what we're given as evidence of his artistic output?

Page 171: Hal is reading the Riverside Hamlet at Mario's request. Hal has agreed to help Mario with a conceptual film-type project based on part of the play. Or is this another case of Mario intuiting something that Hal needs and giving it to him as Mario did when he acquired the O.E.D for his brother?
Page 172: Tennis and the Feral Prodigy, 11.5 minute digital entertainment cartridge directed, recorded, edited, and- according to the entry form - apparently written by Mario Incandenza. If Mario indeed wrote this, he's an admittedly gifted ironist. Can you be a gifted ironist - use irony as a mode of critique - and claim no access to the written word? Is there a one to one correspondence between the two?
Page 188: We're told that Mario was asked to leave Winter Hill Special School in Cambridgeport for "cheerfully declining even to try to learn to really read explaining that he'd rather listen and watch." Again we're told he's "a fanatical listener/observer." Which is true. No argument there. I'm a fanatical listener/observer too and I can tell you I go to enormous lengths to preserve that status.
Page 202: It's pointed out that "a lot of U.S. adults truly cannot read, not even a ROM hypertext phonics thing with HELP functions for every word." This *fact* aside, here is the narrator pointing out that there's more than one way to learn how to read and that there are some people who "truly" cannot. Okay. After writing this, I feel like maybe I'm over-reaching here. But what the heck. My point is that a fanatical listener/observer would maybe go out of their way to preserve their ability to listen and observe by feeding people's perceptions of their disabilities and that maybe Mario declined to learn to read because maybe he already knows how.

Narrator-I-Can't-Identify-Because-of-the-Spoiler-Line: There is another character who could be narrating, but I haven't spent too much time going this route because it really fucks with my head and makes me sort of fetally-inclined in a Requiem for a Dream kind of way that is very much about anti-entertainment/anti-pleasure. In a word, it is lurid in the same way Kate Gompert describes her depression. It occurred to me during my first read and occurs each time said possible narrator intrudes in a way that I can't identify right now because of the spoiler line (and of which I'm aware of now only because I've read the book before). But passages like this (after Joelle V. D. has pointed out to Gately that "There for the Grace of God" is literally a meaningless phrase) are part and parcel of this narrator's presence:

Gately looks at a rectangular blue-selvaged expanse of clean linen whose gentle rises barely allude to any features below, he looks at her and has no idea whether she's serious or not, or whacked, or trying like Dr. Geoff Day to erect Denial-type fortifications with some kind of intellectualish showing off, and he doesn't know what to say in reply, he has absolutely nothing in his huge square head to Identify with her with or latch onto or say in encouraging reply, and for an instant the Provident cafeteria seems pin-drop silent, and his own heart grips him like an infant rattling the bars of its playpen, and he feels a greasy wave of an old and almost unfamiliar panic, and for a second it seems inevitable that at some point in his life he's going to get high again and be back in the cage all over again, because for a second the blank white veil levelled at him seems a screen on which might well be projected a casual and impressive black and yellow smiley-face, grinning, and he feels all the muscles in his own face loosen and descend kneeward; distended...

Is there only one narrator? I think there is. I wouldn't have said that on the first read.

Next: I have to much to talk about w/r/t Orin Incandenza and one-to-one correspondence.

*Bifurcation of space/time is one of my favorite rhetorical devices.