Abstract: This essay presents an embodied cognitive reading of voice in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996). Drawing on recent research on inner speech and the reading act, I trace the reader’s performative experience of inner voicing, which the novel conducts through specific formal and stylistic choices motivated by Wallace’s keen ear for the aural dimension of written prose. I argue that the reader’s experiential voicing of Infinite Jest is critical to the philosophical work the novel is doing around questions of the self and our intersubjective relations with others. At the same time, the novel offers readers a contemplative experience of inner speech and its function in our everyday lives as linguistic agents, and the special role it plays in literary experience.
Christopher T. White (2026) studied this question.