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My VERY SPOILERY thoughts after finishing Infinite Jest below the fold.

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The last page of  Infinite Jest is less of an ending than an end. The chronological ending happens right in the beginning and forms the basis for several long distance narrative feints, the largest and most important for me being the cause of Hal Incandenza’s unfortunate breakdown. DMZ, acquired on page 169, seemed the most likely contender. I imagined that the story would end somewhere at Whataburger, with a very DFW description of the kind of DMZ mediated bad trip that could explain the opening scenes. That idea ended up in the dumpster on page 965.

Pemulis and Hal never did chat as far as we know, but it seems clear that Hal was already in the midst of a sober-style breakdown of the sort that did in the elder Incandenza. Sort of realistic, considering, with the Bob Hope self-medicating Hal fighting off PTSD-style psychic repercussions over being the first to witness the aftermath of Himselfs’ demapping.

There is no doubt things happen between the physical end of the book and the narritive/chronological end. Hal’s aborted attempt to visit NA is ushered in by the offhand narrative remark on page 787:

Much later, in subsequent events’ light, Johnette F. would clearly recall the sight of the boy’s frozen hair slowly settling, and how the boy had said whom, and the sight of a clear upscale odor-free saliva almost running over his lower lip as he fought to pronounce the word without swallowing.

I really don’t know what subsequent events this tidbit refers to. The narrative cuts out before an apparent paramilitary strike by wheelchair assassins on ETA. Orin is dead  or really really uncomfortable (a nod to those of us who started to hate the casual sociopath). Hal apparently survives the assassins and plays at Whataburger (well, if the first scene is reliable). The entire country seems to have avoided the separatist plot to inflict the Entertainment on an unsuspecting (but now PSA informed) public.

[Aside: You can probably tell that I've been deeply absorbed into the language of the novel. Phrases like "paramilitary strike by wheelchair assassins," though clearly totally outlandish, begin to make a kind of humorous sense once the logic of the novel has been kicked into you.]

Don Gately and the Ennet house crew never really did interface with the Incandenzas in any serious way beyond the illusory and allusory ghost of himself. It seems clear to me that the book ends because Don Gately dies (or doesn’t — see the update below), having sort of spiritually nowhere to go except into his own painful past, visiting in turn pasts of greater and greater pain, having been placed on this path by the same kind of unintentionally related Nuck/Gately violence that brought him to the Ennet house at the beginning. I thought the last line was a beautiful send off.

And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.

UPDATE: Man the ending is complex, separating as it does the reader from the chronological ending of the text, which begins the whole endeavor and should be read immediately after as well. We have only this hint of Don Gately and Hal intersecting paths somewhere in the missing time between the last page and the first:

I think of John N. R. Wayne, who would have won this year’s WhataBurger, standing watch in a mask as Donald Gately and I dig up my fa­ther’s head. There’s very little doubt that Wayne would have won.

Of course, just to further confuse the issue, Hal’s father didn’t have a head left to bury, did he? I thought it popped like a grape in the microwave.

UPDATE UPDATE: It’s way past my bedtime and I’m still piecing things together, just trying to get the basic plot points straight and figure out what happens between the last page and the first. One particular passage that I quoted before has acquired entirely new depths of meaning after something like a thousand pages:

I will be conveyed to an Emergency Room of some kind, where I will be detained as long as I do not respond to questions, and then, when I do respond to questions, I will be sedated; so it will be the inversion of standard travel, the ambulance and ER: I’ll make the journey first, then depart.

I really like this book.

UPDATE CUBED: Final theory before I go to bed. The missing time between the last and first pages simulates a blackout for the reader.

UPDATE ^ 4: There’s a great thread about what happens to Hal over at the Infinite Summer forums. For instance, I didn’t know that the Year of Glad was the final year in subsidized time. Did the separatists manage to release The Entertainment?