Multiple Narrative Disentanglement: Unraveling Infinite Jest

Many works (of both fiction and non-fiction) span multiple, intersecting narratives, each of which constitutes a story in its own right. In this work I introduce the task of multiple narrative disentanglement (MND), in which the aim is to tease these narratives apart by assigning passages from a text to the sub-narratives to which they belong. The motivating example I use is David Foster Wallace’s fictional text Infinite Jest. I selected this book because it contains multiple, interweaving narratives within its sprawling 1,000-plus pages. I propose and evaluate a novel unsupervised approach to MND that is motivated by the theory of narratology. This method achieves strong empirical results, successfully disentangling the threads in Infinite Jest and significantly outperforming baseline strategies in doing so.