“Perhaps the greatest example of this movement between [narrative] registers, however, is the phrase Infinite Jest itself.  Over the course of the novel it moves from naming a film or set of films to naming the novel itself and the “work” of the novel, its literary task.  Jest, after all, comes from the Latin gerere, “to do;” the novel becomes a gesture, a perpetual performance.”

– from “Narrative Modeling and Community Organizing in The Pale King and Infinite Jest, by Andrew Warren (which appears in Studies in the Novel, volume 44 number 4)