Comment by npilk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by npilk | Hacker News Reader

I've seen a theory that the mistakes Pemulis makes are intentional, and signal that he isn't as smart as he thinks and that he doesn't really have everything in control.

I'm not sure; clearly DFW had some math aptitude but these also could have been honest mistakes. Presumably it would have been harder for editors to check these things in the 90s.

The probability error seems harder to explain and likely just a mistake.

Edit - While searching a bit more about this, I found an interesting perspective on a message board:

> The main thing that I think argues for Pemulis not being as smart as he thinks he is, is that he is the analogue of Polonious from Hamlet. In Hamlet, the court jester (the "fool") is actually really wise and always speaks the truth (=Mario), while the King's supposedly "wise" counselor, Polonious, actually gets everything wrong.

I find that pretty compelling. I hadn't really thought about deeper correspondences with Hamlet beyond Hal and his parents.

https://infinitesummer.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=471

They are purposeful, I don't think Pemulis ever gets one thing right in the novel. His explanation of Annular Fusion is a good example, unless you also want to make the case that Wallace got the made up science wrong as well. Pemulis grew up in a place where he was generally the smartest person around and was able to bluff his way through life without much effort. Then he got a scholarship to somewhere with actual expectations and standards but Pemulis kept on with his lazy ways. Pemulis is probably smart but his laziness and arrogance keep him from ever achieving his own intelligence, he is forever lobbing but is a bit too slow to get to the net in time.

Vast majority of character's are well explained and the answers are all in the novel, just need to look at their childhood and upbringing.

No one of any level of math skill would mistake the the derivative of x^n as nx + x^n-1. There's no way DFW messed that up, but it's also a pretty bizarre mistake to have a character make if they're supposed to be making mistakes.

In terms of 'meeting the reader where they are,' you would want to telegraph the math mistakes pretty hard, or they would fly past everyone. Making them obvious and dumb is the only way they'll get attributed to the character, rather than the author.

Ah yes, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, a famously “meet the reader where they are” book

Eschaton was just slop for the masses!

Perhaps my favorite deliberate error in arithmetic is from Winston Groom's Forrest Gump, during the protagonist's tour in Vietnam:

> I am the machine gun ammo bearer, cause they figger I can carry a lot of shit on account of my size. Before we lef, a couple of other fellers axed if I would mind carryin some of their han grenades so’s they could carry more orations, an I agreed. It didn’t hurt me none. Also, Sergeant Kranz made me carry a ten-gallon water can that weighed about fifty pounds.

Unlike Forrest, the reader knows a gallon of water weighs roughly eight pounds and is not spared the extent of his burden.

Eighty pounds is "about fifty pounds", especially considering that a water can worth carrying at all is often not full, and insofar as nothing else in the paragraph is given a specific weight so the precise number doesn't really matter.

> the reader knows a gallon of water weighs roughly eight pounds

Haha, you have to love those quaint, backwards Americans and their “freedom units”. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, we can peacefully enjoy the fact that 3.785 litres of water weighs exactly 3.785 kg.

> Unlike Forrest, the reader knows a gallon of water weighs roughly eight pounds

Maybe at the time. Presumably that gets an explanatory footnote in modern editions?

Would Pemulis be Polonius though? If he were the advisor to the king, then the king would more likely be Tavis, not Hal.

I do like the idea of Mario as a court jester though.

Good point. Although the book isn't any sort of adaptation, so I could see including an allusion to the Polonius character even in a slightly different role.

(I'd also forgotten about the janitors, who are clearly a reference to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern)

I associated Pemulis with Polonius based on the phonemic similarity of the names. I don't have the maths background to evaluate the mistakes, but agree that if intentional they "match" with the character's presentation in Hamlet.

Maybe a phonetic similarity with "pretentious" as well

Wouldn't Pemulis' mathematical errors be consistent with how Infinite Jest begins? I.e., he has some sort of degenerative condition directly or indirectly associated with exposure to strange mold found in the basement of his childhood home?

It's Hal who ate the mold and who's blasted at the "beginning" of Infinite Jest

Thanks for correcting me on that. It's been years since I read this great book.

Could you not spoil things?

And the title

Maybe DFW wasn't as smart as he thought he was.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com