Nerve gas, Weapon of chemical warfare that affects the transmission of nerve impulses through the nervous system.
According to Ryan Compton's Infinite Jest by the Numbers, Wallace used a vocabulary of 20,584 unique words to write the 577,608-word Infinite Jest. 10. 11. n+1 has a neat story about where the name for Michael Pemulis, Hal's drug-dealing friend at Enfield Tennis Academy, came from.
###Here's What You Need to Know###. David Foster Wallace's INFINITE JEST is a postmodern novel with a premodern message. Wallace, who railed against irony, wanted to be sincere in his writing. So while this book does contain many postmodern conventions, its ideas about humanity aren't postmodern at all.