Two Ways to Draw Infinite Jest's Sierpinski Gasket

Figure 1: JPEG produced with DALL-E 3

In a 1996 Bookworm interview with Michael Silverblatt, David Foster Wallace confirmed something Silverblatt had spotted about Infinite Jest:

Silverblatt, talking about Infinite Jest's structure:

I said to myself, this must be fractals.

DFW replied:

I've heard you're an acute reader…. That's one of the things, structurally, that's going on… It's actually structured like something called a Sierpinski Gasket, which is a very primitive kind of pyramidical fractal, although what was structured as a Sierpinski Gasket was the draft that I delivered to [my editor] Michael in '94, and it went through some I think 'mercy cuts', so it's probably kind of a lopsided Sierpinski Gasket now…. it looks basically like a pyramid on acid

A Sierpinski Gasket is a fractal triangle composed of triangles within triangles within triangles within…. You get the idea. Here's an illustration.

Figure 2: Sierpinski triangle, via Wikimedia Commons

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