In the last hundred or so pages of Infinite Jest, Don Gately, a big, lovable ex-drug-addict living at the Ennet Halfway House, finds himself in a really difficult position. He has just been shot in the shoulder. He is at the hospital, where doctors keep materializing all serpent-like asking if he wants any drugs for the pain. If he thinks the pain is bad now, they say, ha ha, it will only get worse. All he has to do is nod his head and sexy R.N.s will come bearing silver platters and hook him up to an endless supply of Demerol with a red squeezy thing that will allow him to self-administer as he pleases. For a drug-addict, this could be one version of “heaven” where one can just doze, watch tv, be fed through a tube, and not even have to move or exert energy to produce one’s own bowel movements. Seriously, being shot in the shoulder could be considered more a boon than a bane. There’s no guarantee that he will relapse from using just once, and all these authority figures dressed in white are telling him it’s OKAY, so why does Gately not give in and take the drugs?
The answer, of course, is that he is an AA success story, rehabilitated, reborn, equipped with all the necessary skills for him to Just Say No.
So there you go, but then you think, only a certain kind of person completely buys into AA, like, if you take into account how it was just invented by some guys named Bill and Bob, it is practically a cult, and the people who buy into are probably of the weak-minded and easily manipulated sort. These AA success stories come out of the program repeating cheezy mantras like “One-Day-At-A-Time,” “Resentment is the #1 Offender”; in short, spacey, proselytizing, completely brainwashed.
The “strong-minded” ones are perhaps the more tragic figures–these Raskolnikovs believe they have their own internal moral code, refuse to “abide” simply because society tells them what they’re doing is wrong. The more alluring character for an artist and his educated readers (I would have guessed) would be this latter type, who goes “Out There” into the wilderness and is able, using his own DIY moral compass, to come into the best possible good life for himself in the world.
"This wasn’t hardly like slipping over to Unit #7 with a syringe and a bottle of Visine. This was a stop-term measure, a short-gap-type measure, the probable intervention of a compassionate unjudging God.” --Infinite Jest, p. 888
So what is Wallace trying to do, making Gately, a real Al Anon success story, the ultimate hero of Infinite Jest? Are we supposed to think of his refusal as truly a sacrifice, as in, a Kierkegaardian leap of faith, or just a stupid, simple Adam-in-Paradise-Lost- style obeisance? Is his abstention a spiritual decision, as in he has true faith and a real investment in abstaining, or is he just victim to blind dogma?
I think that Wallace goes to great lenghts (170 pages & more of the last section) to show us that this former “BIM” (Big Indesctructible Moron) has in fact more depth and humanity than all the rest of us who have lots of education and cultural knowledge combined. Gately does not simply refuse drugs without thinking, he thinks about it constantly, for pages and pages, thinks about the pros and cons, (“Would Codeine lead to relapse?”), thinks about what his life has meant and what it means to continue living. This is more than any of us have to deal with on a daily basis.
There is a real moment of transcendence, and I’m not joking, when Gately eventually resorts to thrusting out his bad arm to attack the balls of a doctor to stop him from offering him drugs, which Gately knows he won’t be able to refuse. We feel this immensity of pain, both physically and psychologically, but somehow, suddenly, everything about life is redeemable. Because in the worst of odds against himself, Gately has decided through this one gesture that life is worth not giving up on.
It is such a raw depiction of Gately’s imperative to recover, stay well, and survive. And maybe we see a bit of Wallace in this unassuming hero as well. After living in a halfway house and then a quarter-way house, Wallace reported that he found sayings like “One Day At a Time” surprisingly helpful. It “enabled people to walk through hell,” he said. Abstaining at all costs was not about winning an intellectual, philsophical game, but a question of finding a way, whatever way that was, to survive.
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