Reading Diary – Fun with Footnotes
I never though footnotes could be so fun since starting Infinite Jest. Foster Wallace uses them in such an amazing way. They provide clarification and cite resources just like you would expect. But these are no orginary footnotes.
Foster Wallace takes them above and beyond what you could ever imagine they could be used for. Almost like a third plane of existence that every other author has been missing out on utilizing. His footnotes are anecdotes, inside jokes, calirifiers, and short stories. I just finished one footnote that I was expecting to explain why one character lost his legs. Instead, the footnote is a short story for a second character writing a term paper about the organization that the wheelchair bound character belongs to, and therefore, how he looses his legs. And I haven’t even scratched the surface. I am only on #45 out of over 400 footnotes.
Let the journey continue.
