Characters
Avril Incandenza, Mother of Hal Incandenza. Widow to James Orin Incandenza. Administrator at Enfield Tennis Academy. Strict grammarian.
Orin Incandenza. Brother of Hal Incandenza. Son of James and Avril.
Hal Incandena. Out little mold eating Hamlet.
Characters Mentioned
Winnie the Pooh. Hal's pajamas.
Scene: Weston, a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts. The backyard garden of the Incandenza family home in Spring of the year 1997?/1998? before Subsidized Time.
This section is a flashback to a seminal moment in Hal's life. Possibly! It's not exactly Hal's memory but Hal's retelling of his brother Orin's memory. Told as it is after Hal blames his strange condition in the Year of Glad on something he ate, it's easy to assume that his problems stem from this moment in his childhood when he took a bite of a disgusting mass of mold and fungus from their moist and mildewy basement. The question becomes, "Did eating basement fungus actually do anything to Hal at all? Or is it just an easy unknown to blame all of one's problems on? Or is his mother's reaction the point of the story?"
Avril panics when she comprehends what her son was done and begins screaming, "Help! My son ate this!", while running laps around the small garden. Hal does not remember this so it's hard to think that his mother's reaction could have left an impression on him while, possibly, eating something toxic could have had a lasting effect. More probably, this memory, and Avril's "hysterical" reaction (Hal's wording via Orin's relating of the memory) would have had a significant impact on Orin, as he's the one who experienced and retained the memory.
Later in the novel, we get a slightly more descriptive and thorough retelling of this memory from Orin's point of view. I believe it mostly differs in going slightly past Avril and Hal running around in a blind panic to suggest that a neighbor, or possibly Orin's father, arrived to help.
Later in the novel, much of the action centers around the culture of Alcoholics Anonymous. One of the things members of AA begin to catapult from their lives like garbage into the concavity are the excuses for why they do and think the things they do. There can be stories and facts and memories that may, at times, sound like excuses but as one spends more time in AA, you begin to Identify who's using their stories as excuses and who's just painting the picture of what the fuck they did. Does Hal hold the story of eating fungus-covered mold as an excuse for what's happened to him by the beginning of the novel? It's hard not to think this being that he basically blames his current condition on "something I ate" and then flashes back to this, his brother's, memory. Or does the remembrance just happen to come to the forefront of his mind when he thinks of having et something, possibly the military-grade hallucinogen?
It's also still possible that he watched Infinite Jest! But, as you may quickly be sussing out, all I currently have are questions because this is just my second time reading this thing! I feel like, after this, I'll have a much better handle on it and then I could do a third read-through where I could be all, "Oh, and Hal's all fucked up here because he watched that movie with the naked, disfigured woman apologizing to her baby for thirty full minutes for, presumably, having brought it into this shit world? And is that why people find pleasure in it and want to view it over and over again? Because, ultimately, the reason we're all living out this fucking painful bullshit reality is because two narcissistic horndogs decided to fuck and now we're being punished? So viewing a movie using a special visual technology that basically puts the viewer back into the body of an infant while our mother apologizes over and over again for bringing us into this world (and ultimately killing us because all life dies and that's part of the movie too, sort of (and not just any mother! The Prettiest Girl of All Time! Even if her face is a ravaged mess from having a jar of acid smashed across it!))? I mean, I was near weeping when I explained the premise of the Infinite Jest entertainment to the Non-Certified Wife!"
Anyway, Hal eats some nasty shit at five years old and it might have caused him long-term harm that doesn't manifest until he's seventeen is what this section details.
Piecing Together the November, DAU, to November, Glad, Timeline
The February after the end of the novel, Coach White, via correspondence, recruited Hal to the University of Phoenix tennis program after Hal's graduation from Enfield later that same year (a December graduation, it seems).
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