June 1, 2026
Fractal or fraud? Book nerds brawl
Two Ways to Draw Infinite Jest's Sierpinski Gasket
Readers say Infinite Jest is either genius math art or total pseudo-deep nonsense
TLDR: The article says David Foster Wallace designed _Infinite Jest_ like a hidden triangle pattern that only becomes clear after rereading. Commenters were split between calling it brilliant and calling it AI-sounding nonsense, with plenty of sarcasm and literary one-upmanship in between.
A fresh attempt to explain why people keep rereading Infinite Jest like it’s a spiritual side quest has set off the comments. The article argues that David Foster Wallace built the famously massive novel like a Sierpinski triangle — basically a shape made of smaller and smaller triangles — and that readers slowly “discover” that shape over multiple rereads. In plain English: the first read feels like chaos, later reads supposedly reveal a hidden design. Wallace even once said that was actually part of the plan, though after editing it became, in his own words, a little “lopsided.”
But the real show is the crowd reaction. One camp was instantly skeptical, with one commenter delivering the killer line that the post “feels very LLM” — internet shorthand for something that sounds smart without really saying much. Ouch. Another said using the book’s three main settings as the corners of the triangle “doesn’t really work,” then launched their own theory: maybe the real corners are family, education, and society. So yes, even the anti-post crowd immediately started making their own fractal maps.
And then came the comedy relief. One deadpan commenter dropped, “Apparently, Infinite Jest is a book,” complete with a Wikipedia link, which is the kind of drive-by sarcasm the internet was invented for. Meanwhile, one reader still slogging through page 600 confessed they’re scared of spoilers but called the novel “solidly prophetic.” So the mood is clear: half the room is shouting “genius!”, the other half is yelling “word salad!”, and everyone is somehow still trapped inside the triangle.
Key Points
- •The article cites a 1996 *Bookworm* interview in which David Foster Wallace said *Infinite Jest* was structured like a Sierpinski Gasket, though later edits altered the draft's original form.
- •It explains the classical recursive construction of a Sierpinski Gasket and says Wallace used an analogous top-down method when building the novel.
- •The article identifies three institutional vertices in the book: Enfield Tennis Academy, Ennet House, and Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents.
- •It also explains the chaos game, a second method for generating the same fractal by repeated midpoint selection from three vertices.
- •The article argues that rereading *Infinite Jest* resembles the chaos game because repeated, non-sequential attention gradually reveals a larger structural pattern.