Setting
In the novel's future world, North America is one state comprising the United States, Canada, and Mexico, known as the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.). Corporations purchase naming rights to each calendar year, eliminating traditional numerical designations, with most of the book's action taking place in The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (Y.D.A.U.). Much of what used to be the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada has become a hazardous waste dump known as the "Great Concavity" to Americans and as the "Great Convexity" to Canadians.
The novel's primary locations are Enfield Tennis Academy ("ETA") and Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, which are separated by a hillside in suburban Boston, Massachusetts, and a mountainside outside of Tucson, Arizona. Many characters are students or faculty at the school or patients or staff at the halfway house; a conversation between a quadruple agent and his government contact occurs at the Arizona location.
Read more about this topic: Infinite Jest
Famous quotes containing the word setting:
“The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The world is ... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not “inhabit” only “the inner man,” or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.”
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1907–1961)
““Oh, let’s go up the hill and scare ourselves,
As reckless as the best of them tonight,
By setting fire to all the brush we piled
With pitchy hands to wait for rain or snow....””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)