It was the concept of reality, in particular, that led to Wallace’s most famous stylistic quirk: extensive endnotes that tailed much of his work, especially Infinite Jest. “Reality is fractured right now, at least the reality that I live in,” he said to explain why he started using them. “The difficulty about writing . . . about that reality is that text is very linear, it’s very unified. You—I, anyway, am constantly on the lookout for ways to fracture the text that aren’t totally disorienting.”87
