Gödel, Escher, Bach, Wallace: The "O's, D's and P's" in Infinite Jest

"This essay's novel contribution to the critical literature is a typographic close-reading of one moment in Orin's morning chapter, where Wallace describes a peculiar feature of a Subject's handwritten note: "every single circle – o's, d's, p's, the #s 6 and 8 – is darkened in" (pg. 43). The argument is that the three darkened letters (O, D, P) spell, in Orin's perception, the name Oedipus. This may seem like a reach, but the encoding becomes the smoking gun in the case against Avril Incandenza when you appreciate Wallace's intellectual debt to Douglas Hofstadter and Gödel, Escher, Bach – a debt the essay documents in detail below."