DIEGO ROBERTO NEVES TAVARES

To analyze the individual in the fictional and non-fictional work of the writer David Foster Wallace, this research takes the novel Infinite Jest as its central point of view. Under the backdrop of hyperbolized entertainment in the fictional film Infinite Jest, we investigate issues inherent to contemporaneity shaped by this facet. Starting from an understanding of the novel as dystopian, in the sense that, by hyperbolizing the ills of the contemporary, a whole field of observation is opened up, we investigate the literary tradition of which the author is heir and identify, in the face of analysis concerning his contemporaries, Wallace's singularity. The author, in dealing with the misery of his time not from the point of view of paranoia about the exterior - inherent in most American authors who lived through the Cold War - but from and as an interior misery that shapes individuals into a loneliness masked by an entertainment that functionalizes individuals, shaping their subjectivities following market interests, directs us to a range of possibilities about the diseases of the self that plague contemporaneity.
We mobilized philosophical concepts to highlight their relevance and accordance with the themes presented by David Foster Wallace and taken as the object of study in this dissertation.
To understand the context shaped in the novel where the Infinite Jest cartridge leads viewers to their deaths, we used Foster Wallace's analysis of television. Through this context, we explore passages of characters facing addictions in different forms, remaining in a cycle of self-centeredness that distances them from themselves, composing them as part of a world experiencing a decay of values and experience. Melancholy, emptied of its subversive potential and transformed into monotony that repeats the same, is also the subject of study. Exacerbated self-consciousness, understood as something that distances individuals from their legitimate experiences and leads them to addictions, anguish, and loneliness, is confronted, and we propose possibilities for redemption to move toward autonomy. After identifying the lost object of melancholy as attention, we understand the intricate reading of Infinite Jest (non-linear, polyphonic, full of footnotes, permeated by various action nuclei and characters) as an exercise that can rescue readers' attention along the lines of the rescue sought by individuals recovering from substance addiction. This dissertation understands the attention of individuals as something to be rescued through attention along the lines proposed by DFW.