Infinite Jest Lesson Plan

Today's Thought Questions will focus primarily on Wallace's predictions of the future, back in the mid-90s. On a broad level, how correct was Wallace about the times in which we now live? How "Wallaceian" is the United States of the 21st century?

Like many novels with science fictional elements that have entered the canon, Infinite Jest has an important relationship with the near future it depicts, a future which we have, by now, surpassed in the "real world."

This relationship is given further import by the fact that Infinite Jest could be considered, at its core, a speculative fiction. Tom Bissell, in the foreword to the twentieth-anniversary edition, says that...