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One of the many joys of Infinite Jest, made possible because of its tremendous length, is its massive cast of characters. The deeper you go, the more characters you encounter and, as you go even deeper, the intersecting lines between the characters become apparent. Just take a look at this diagram. To celebrate the book’s huge ensemble, we’ve counted down the 10 best characters. For the list, we’re excluding the book’s two “main” characters, Hal and Gately, because they’re given time and consideration that the rest of the characters don’t get, and thus can’t be evaluated in the same way. Be sure to tell us whether you agree of disagree with our selections in the comments!

10.  Barry Loach

Loach’s own soul began to sprout little fungal patches of necrotic rot, and his upbeat view of the so-called normal and respectable human race began to undergo dark revision.

E.T.A. trainer Barry Loach is mentioned only two or three times in the first 900 pages of Infinite Jest. But then, on page 966, in a scene with Hal and the other players readying for Fundraising tennis matches, the narrative zooms in on Loach, who is shaving Hal’s ankle and readying it for athletic tape (“everybody’s had his hands on Loach’s shoulders at one time or another”). From there, in two fat paragraphs that span five pages, we get the long and short of Loach’s life.

Resembling “a blunt and scuttly wingless fly,” Loach comes from an enormous Catholic family. His mother, more than anything, wants one of her children to enter the Roman Catholic clergy. For the following reasons, Loach child after Loach child does not fulfill her wishes:

First-born Loach: Killed in the Brazilian O.N.A.N./U.N. joint action

Second-born Loach: Poisoned by ciguatoxins from a tainted blackfin grouper

Third-born Loach (Therese): Becomes a ring girl in a sequined leotard for professional fights in Atlantic City

Another Loach: Falls helplessly in love and marries right out of high school

Still Another Loach: Burned to play the cymbals; fulfilled wish

And all the way down the line until it’s just Barry (the youngest) and the second-youngest brother. Luckily for Barry, his older brother:

“Was always a pious and contemplative and big-hearted kid, brimming over with abstract love and an innate faith in the indwelling goodness of all men’s souls, [and he] began to show evidence of a true spiritual calling to a life of service in the R.C. clergy.”

But then, not-so-luckily:

“He suffered at age twenty-five a sudden and dire spiritual decline in which his basic faith in the innate indwelling goodness of men like spontaneously combusted and disappeared–and for no apparent or dramatic reason; it just seemed as if the brother had suddenly contracted a black misanthropic spiritual outlook the way some twenty-five-year-old men contract Sanger-Brown’s ataxia or M.S., a kind of degenerative Lou Gehrig’s Disease of the spirit–and his interest in serving man and God-in-man and nurturing the indwelling Christ in people through Jesuitical pursuits underwent an understandable nosedive.”

This is a problem for Barry, the very last Loach, whose “true vocation of splints and flexion” would become nullified should his older brother change his mind and stop his religious pursuit. So, Barry heads down to the seminary to do some convincing. And the two brothers, after “heated and high-level debates on spirituality and the soul’s potential, not unlike Alyosha and Ivan’s conversations in the good old Brothers K.,” settle on this experiment: Barry is to make himself look squalid and stand outside the Park Street T-station and hold out his hand and instead of asking for change from passerbys, he is to ask them just to touch him. If one person touches him, just one, Barry’s brother will re-enter the seminary.

It turns out that “holding out his hand and asking people to touch him ensured that just about the last thing any passerby in his right mind would want to do was touch him.” However, saying “Touch me, just touch me, please,” while not an effective way to get a stranger to touch you, is an effective way to panhandle, and Barry begins to make a good deal of money, “significantly more than he was earning at his work-study job wrapping ankles and sterilizing dental prostheses for Boston College lacrosse players.”

But no touching. Months pass. Barry’s brother stops coming to watch, Barry himself gets fired from his work-study, and basically turns into a bum himself in his quest to get someone to touch him. Despair reigns. He “falls in with the absolute silt at the very bottom of the metro Boston socioeconomic duck-pond.”

But then, in the ninth month, just when Barry is “dangerously close to disappearing forever into the fringes and dregs of metro Boston street life,” something happens, courtesy of Mario Incandenza:

Mario, being alone and only fourteen and largely clueless about anti-stem defensive strategies outside T-stations, had had no one worldly or adult along with him there to explain to him why the request of men with outstretched hands for a simple handshake or High Five shouldn’t automatically be honored and granted, and Mario had extended his clawlike hand and touched and heartily shaken Loach’s own fuliginous hand, which led through convoluted but kind of heartwarming and faith-reaffirming series of circumstances to B. Loach, even w/o an official B.A., being given an Asst. Trainer’s job at E.T.A.

Loach’s memorability is a product of his story’s placement. The fact that Wallace puts his story, which is one of the book’s main arguments for the good of human nature, at the very tail of the narrative is quite significant. In fact, the image of Mario and Loach shaking hands is the third-to-last passage of the book (the only following scenes are Orin revealing the Master’s location and Gately’s climactic vision of Facklemann’s death). Infinite Jest is both comedy and tragedy, and it makes cases for both the good of human nature (Mario, Bruce Green, Joelle Van Dyne) and the evil of human nature (Lenz, the A.F.R. [the broomstick moment], The M.P.), and maybe the book isn’t about one winning out over the other. But in Loach’s particular case, it actually does boil down to good vs. evil, and the simple (yet miraculous) appearance of Mario, resolving the question in the favor of good, makes for one of the book’s most touching moments.

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One of the many joys of Infinite Jest, made possible because of its tremendous length, is its massive cast of characters. The deeper you go, the more characters you encounter and, as you go even deeper, the intersecting lines between the characters become apparent. Just take a look at this diagram. To celebrate the book’s huge ensemble, we’re counting down the 10 best characters over the next two weeks, culminating with the #1 character on Friday, April 13. On that day, we’ll post one giant composite article with all 10 characters. For the list, we’re excluding the book’s two “main” characters, Hal and Gately, because they’re given time and consideration that the rest of the characters don’t get, and thus can’t be evaluated in the same way. So join us as we reveal our favorites and be sure to tell us whether you agree of disagree with our selections in the comments!

#10 Barry Loach, #9 Hugh Steeply, #8 Mrs. Waite, #7 Bruce Green, #6 Ortho Stice, #5 Avril Incandenza, #4 Joelle van Dyne, #3 Michael Pemulis, #2 Eric Clipperton

Today, we’ll look at bradykinetic, middle Incandenza son.

1. Mario Incandenza

And as pinkie meets palm, she says what she’s said for three years of midnights, an opening bit that Mario Incandenza, the least cynical person in the history of Enfield MA, across the river, listening faithfully, finds, for all its black cynicism, terribly compelling.

You could probably see this coming from a mile away.

Mario, himself, is not only a great character, but he makes countless other characters more memorable (see Loach, Avril, Clipperton). He is the emotional node of the Incandenzas, he runs the clockwork of Infinite Jest. If you want something objective (to this reader): he has more sentences that take your breath away than any other character. The book’s best passage (to this reader) is the six page description of Mario’s birth and the way he affects those around him (312-317). In my copy, in which I underline things I like, it looks like this:

I loved this section so much I retyped it just to experience it in a different way. I didn’t even send it to anyone; it’s just sitting on my computer. Allow me a few excerpts:

 He had to be more or less scraped out, Mario, like the meat of an oyster from a womb to whose sides he’d been found spiderishly clinging, tiny and unobtrusive, attached by cords of sinew at both feet and a hand, the other fist stuck to his face by the same material. He was a complete surprise and terribly premature, and withered, and he spent the next many weeks waggling his withered and contractured arms up at the Pyrex ceilings of incubators, being fed by tubes and monitored by wires and cupped in sterile palms, his head cradled by a thumb.

There was almost nobody at E.T.A. or its Enfield-Brighton environs who did not treat Mario M. Incandenza with the casual gentility of somebody who doesn’t pity you or admire you so much as just vaguely prefer it if you were around.

…[he] took citizens’ kindness and cruelty the same way, with a kind of extra-inclined half-bow that mocked his own canted posture without pity or cringe.

Players at Denny’s, when they all get to go to Denny’s, almost vie to see who gets to cut up the cutupable parts of Mario’s under-12-size Kilobreakfast.

And then there’s this, maybe my favorite passage in the book, if not the most gut-punchingly affecting:

And his younger and way more externally impressive brother Hal almost idealizes Mario, secretly. God-type issues aside, Mario is a (semi-) walking miracle, Hal believes. People who’re somehow burned at birth, withered or ablated way past anything like what might be fair, they either curl up in their fire, or else they rise. Withered saurian homodontic Mario floats, for Hal. He calls him Booboo but fears his opinion more than probably anybody except their Moms’s. Hal remembers the unending hours of blocks and balls on the hardwood floors of early childhood’s 36 Belle Ave., Weston MA, tangrams and See ‘N Spell, huge-headed Mario hanging in there for games he could not play, for make-believe in which he had no interest other than proximity to his brother.

Then there’s the section entitled MARIO INCANDENZA’S FIRST AND ONLY EVEN REMOTELY ROMANTIC EXPERIENCE, THUS FAR, in which Millicent Kent (nicknamed the U.S.S. Millicent Kent because of her size) corners Mario in the woods and we get writing like this:

The U.S.S. Millicent Kent told Mario that off the record she’d always felt he had the longest lushest prettiest lashes of any boy on two continents, three if you counted Australia. Mario thanked her kindly, calling her Ma’am and trying to fake a Southern accent.

Mario kept saying Golly Ned, all he could think of to say.

At which point U.S.S. Millicent stopped them in an unprickly thicket of what later turned out to be poison sumac and turned with a strange glint in the one eye that wasn’t in pine-shadow and crushed Mario’s large head to the area just below her breasts and said she needed to confess that Mario’s eyelashes and vest with extendable police lock he used for staying upright in one place had for quite some time now driven her right around the bend with sensual feeling. What Mario perceived as a sudden radical drop in the prevailing temperature was in fact the U.S.S. Millicent Kent’s sexual stimulation sucking tremendous quantities of ambient energy out of the air surrounding them.

And there’s the section early on between E.T.A. coach Gerhardt Schtitt and Mario, and why Schtitt prefers Mario’s company:

Mario is basically a born listener. One of the positives to being visibly damaged is that people can sometimes forget you’re there, even when they’re interfacing with you. You almost get to eavesdrop. It’s almost like they’re like: If nobody’s really in there, there’s nothing to be shy about. That’s why bullshit often tends to drop away around damaged listeners, deep beliefs revealed, diary-type private reveries indulged out loud; and, listening, the beaming and bradykinetic boy gets to forge an interpersonal connection he knows only he can truly feel, here.

The point of reiterating all of these scenes here is to show how many pages in Infinite Jest are made memorable by Mario’s presence, and the effect his presence brings out in other characters. Mario becomes like Wallace’s narrative skeleton key, allowing us access to a score of the book’s cast, adding layers of understanding to our reading that wouldn’t exist without him.

One more example–here’s why there’s a relationship between Pemulis and Mario:

 The two have the kind of transpersonal bond that shared interests and mutual advantage can inspire: if Mario’s not helping Pemulis fabricate the products of independent-optical-study work M.P. isn’t really much into doing, then Pemulis is giving Mario, who’s a film-nut but no great tech-mind, serious help with cinemo-optical praxis.

That’s why Mario is a great character, narratively speaking. Speaking in the ways that stories really matter–namely, their ability to move us–Mario is a great character because the relationship he has with all of these characters shows the best sides of their nature. Go down the line with the characters that Mario, in one way or another, touches: Hal, Avril, Loach, Himself, Clipperton, Millicent Kent, Pemulis, Schtitt. Every single one of them becomes more human–becomes better–for having Mario in their lives, even despite the evil and sadness that is also in the book’s world. In that way, Mario is a sort elixir of goodness. He is purely good, and this rubs off on those who are near him.

Mario is Infinite Jest‘s finest example of the good of humanity in the face of difficulty and evil. He is an argument for good’s strength over addiction, tragedy, and loss. He’s the book’s most memorable character, and one of the very best characters I’ve encountered in anything I’ve read. In all the dense pages of Infinite Jest, the parts I’ll remember most fondly are the singular images centered around Mario:

Coach Schtitt and Mario tear-ass downhill on W. Commonwealth on Schtitt’s old BMW, bound for Evangeline’s Low-Temperature Confections in Newton Center, right at the bottom of what usually gets called Heartbreak Hill, Schtitt intense-faced and leaning forward like a skier, his white scarf whipping around and whipping Mario’s face, in the sidecar, as Mario too leans way forward into their downhill flight, preparing to whoop when they bottom out.

One of the many joys of Infinite Jest, made possible because of its tremendous length, is its massive cast of characters. The deeper you go, the more characters you encounter and, as you go even deeper, the intersecting lines between the characters become apparent. Just take a look at this diagram. To celebrate the book’s huge ensemble, we’re counting down the 10 best characters over the next two weeks, culminating with the #1 character on Friday, April 13. On that day, we’ll post one giant composite article with all 10 characters. For the list, we’re excluding the book’s two “main” characters, Hal and Gately, because they’re given time and consideration that the rest of the characters don’t get, and thus can’t be evaluated in the same way. So join us as we reveal our favorites and be sure to tell us whether you agree of disagree with our selections in the comments!

#10 Barry Loach, #9 Hugh Steeply, #8 Mrs. Waite, #7 Bruce Green, #6 Ortho Stice, #5 Avril Incandenza, #4 Joelle van Dyne, #3 Michael Pemulis

Today, we’ll look at the leader of the Clipperton Brigade.

2. Eric Clipperton

Nobody’d heard of him before or knew where he came from. He’d just sort of seepily risen, some sort of human radon, from someplace low and unknown, whence he lent the cliche ‘Win or Die in the Attempt’ grotesquely literal new levels of sense.

It only takes the space of about seven pages for Eric Clipperton to make himself one of Infinite Jest‘s most memorable characters. His story is delivered as a legend: he is a sixteen-year-old boy who one day shows up to a tennis tournament. No one knows who he is and his only listed affiliation is “Ind.”, presumably for “Independent.” Midway through his first tournament match, already losing, Clipperton goes to his bag and pulls out a Glock 17. He then announces to the crowd that, should he lose, he’ll blow his brains out on the court. He wins the match, playing the rest of it with the gun to his head, his opponent Ross Reat “obliterated psychologically.”

What follows is a string of tournaments in which Clipperton appears, plays with the gun to his head, and his opponents (now known as “the Clipperton Brigade”) “barely even try, or else they go for impossible angles and spins, or else talk on mobile phones while they play or try to hit every ball between their legs or behind their backs” because the USTA finds out about Clipperton’s stunt and nullifies all losses to him, “and a boy who found himself in the Clipperton Brigade and defaulted his round tended to view that tournament as a kind of unexpected vacation, a chance to rest and heal, to finally get some sun on the chest and ankles, to work on chinks in his game’s armor, to reflect a little on what it all might mean.”

Clipperton never loses. He wins six major junior tournaments. And after he collects his trophies, he always “vanishes like the ground itself inhaled him.”

After the fluke of getting ranked #1 in the 18-and-under, Clipperton shows up at ETA one night and asks to speak with Incandenza. Shortly thereafter, Clipperton shoots himself in a room that becomes known as the Clipperton Suite, in front of Incandenza and Mario, his only friend.

And despite the sad end to Clipperton’s short appearance in the book, despite the oddness of his appearance in the first place, the truly memorable thing about Clipperton is his friendship to Mario–the sum total of which is contained within one brief glimpse of video footage captured at a tennis tournament. That moment is one of the book’s most beautiful and stirring:

Just a couple overexposed meters of Clipperton, head down and hunched on a low orange bleacher, bony-shouldered, in no shirt and untied Nikes, his Gothic-scripted case in his lap, his elbows on his knees and his hands spidered across both cheeks, staring down between his feet and trying not to smile as a withered-toddler-sized and forward-listing Mario stands beside him, supported by his portable police lock, holding a light-meter and something else too halated to make out on the tape, open very wide for a homodontic laugh at something funny Clipperton has apparently just let slip.