Abstract

This article argues that David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest can be read as a “Tocquevillian” novel, showing that its depiction of late 20th century American life is a profound exploration of the democratic soul. By analyzing the confusion within ordinary understandings of the meaning of freedom and illustrating how this confusion leads to a paralyzing moral relativism and the unsatisfying pursuit of pleasure, Wallace diagnoses the pathologies of the modern American mind. Wallace suggests that in a hypercommercialized democracy, the pursuit of pleasure inevitably devolves into the “soft despotism” of addiction. But underlying Wallace’s critique of American consumerism and various addictions are dynamics that Tocqueville would have recognized as contained in the logic of the mind formed by the democratic regime. Wallace argues that the democratic soul seeks solace from its restlessness in self-annihilating compulsions. He frames the struggle for sobriety within Alcoholics Anonymous as a struggle for self-knowledge and self-governance, offering a model for countering the American pathologies he diagnoses.

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