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Infinite Jest

  by David Foster Wallace

(about 1,921 pages)
480,194
total words
99th PERCENTILE
of all the books in our library
86.68%
vividness
59th PERCENTILE
of all the books in our library
5.76%
passive voice
4th PERCENTILE
of all the books in our library
3.31%
all adverbs
76th PERCENTILE
of all the books in our library
1.55%
ly-adverbs
92nd PERCENTILE
of all the books in our library
1.76%
non-ly-adverbs
32nd PERCENTILE
of all the books in our library

clippings from this book

We’ve analyzed hundreds of millions of words, from thousands of different authors, training our linguistic models to recognize the most vivid words in the English language… the words that create the most intense sensory experiences: colors, textures, sounds, flavors, and aromas.

Based on our analysis, we’ve scanned through the pages of this book to find the two pages at the extremes, both the most-passive and the most-vivid pages, so that you can compare them side-by-side and see the difference:

MOST PASSIVE PAGE
MOST VIVID PAGE
His other son carried them in a special case. Leith was cameras, the son was lenses. Lenses Jim said were what he had to bring to the whole enterprise. Of filmmaking. Of himself. He made all his own.’ ‘Q.’ ‘Well I’ve never been around them. But I know there’s something wobbled and weird about their vision, supposedly. I think the newer-born they are, the more the wobble. Plus I think a milky blur. Neonatal nystagmus. I don’t know where I heard that term. I don’t remember. It could have been Jim. It could have been the son. What I know about infants personally you could — it may have been an astigmatic lens. I don’t think there’s much doubt the lens was supposed to reproduce an infantile visual field. That’s what you could feel was driving the scene. My face wasn’t important. You never got the sense it was meant to be captured realistically by this lens.’ ‘Q.’ ‘I never saw it. I’ve got no idea.’ ‘Q.’ ‘They were buried with him. The Masters of everything unreleased. At least that was in his will.’ ‘Q.’ ‘It had nothing to do with killing himself. Less than nothing to do with it.’ ‘Q.’ ‘No I never saw his fucking will. He told me. He told me things. ‘He’d stopped being drunk all the time. That killed him. He couldn’t take it but he’d made a promise.’ ‘Q.’ ‘I don’t know that he ever even got a finished Master. That’s your story. There wasn’t and more of the lionskin Dacronyl carpet. And the warm air in 32A is stuffy with CO2 and unpleasantly scented with the aroma of soft male middle-aged bodies not wearing footwear, a stale meaty cheesy smell, more nauseous even than the E.T.A. locker room after a Mrs. Clarke Tex-Mex fiesta. The only guy in the Meeting to acknowledge Hal’s entrance is at the front of the room, a man Hal would have to call almost morbidly round, his body nearly Leith-sized and globularly round and the smaller but still large globe of a head atop it, his socks plaid and his legs not all the way crossable so it looks like he might pitch disastrously backward in his chair any minute, smiling warmly at Hal’s winter coat and NASA glass as Hal slinks and sits and slumps down low. The round man’s chair is positioned under a small white Magic Marker blackboard, and all the other chairs approximately face it, and the man holds a Magic Marker in one hand and holds what looks quite a bit like a teddy bear to his chest with the other, and wears chinos and a cable-knit Norwegian sweater the color of toast. His hair is that waxy sort of blond, and he’s got the blond eyebrows and creepy blond eyelashes and violently flushed face of a true Norwegian blond, and his little beard is an imperial so sharply waxed it looks like a truncated star. The morbidly round blond man’s pretty

emotional story arc

Click anywhere on the chart to see the most significant emotional words — both positive & negative — from the corresponding section of the text…
This chart visualizes the the shifting emotional balance for the arc of this story, based on the emotional strength of the words in the prose, using techniques pioneered by the UVM Computational Story Lab. To create this story arc, we divided the complete manuscript text into 50 equal-sized chunks, each with 9603.88 words, and then we scored each section by counting the number of strongly-emotional words, both positive and negative. The bars in the chart move downward whenever there’s conflict and sadness, and they move upward when conflicts are resolved, or when the characters are happy and content. The size of each bar represents the positive or negative word-count of that section.

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