Infinite Jest timeline
Events mentioned or described in Infinite Jest (1996) are listed below in chronological order based on textual evidence.
Events mentioned or described in Infinite Jest (1996) are listed below in chronological order based on textual evidence.
This is a chapter-by-chapter summary of Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, intended for readers wanting to refresh their memory on previous chapters. The pages numbers are from the 2002 Avon Books paperback (ISBN 978-0-06-051280-4). It’s currently incomplete, with the second half of the book coming soon.
28 November 1941, Shanghai. It’s a Friday afternoon, so the streets are crowded with coolies transporting boxes of bank bills. A boom from the river empties the streets of the coolies, but not the boxes and bamboo poles. Corporal Bobby Shaftoe of the Fourth Marines comes up with haikus for the event.
A young Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse figures that his church organ must be very complex to be able to produce such complex music, and learns all about its mechanics. He majors in mechanical engineering at Iowa State College and plays glockenspiel in the band. He gets a scholarship to Princeton and befriends Alan Turing, who is building a machine to calculate values of the important Riemann zeta function. Alan proposal to have sex with Lawrence is rejected. There’s a German guy named Rudy whom Alan has sex with. When the three of them take a bike ride to the Pine Barrens, Alan tells Lawrence about:
Alan thinks brains are Turing machines. Alan goes back to England and gets secret work. Due to his poor grades, Lawrence becomes a glockenspiel player in the Navy in Hawaii, but not before becoming published in a mathematical journal.