Pemulis (whom David Foster Wallace called one of Infinite Jest's Antichrists and who is also widely seen as the book's most divisive character [1] but in this particular story is a rather obvious Jake Barnes to Hemingway device for Pemulis's blog à clef, if you will, and Pemulis allows and encourages the reader to make whatever connections he or she may wish to the fact that he raises the fact that Pemulis is a divisive character in IJ) arrives in Grenoble to the awe of the mountains that surround him at every step. He dreams of living a complex and glamorous life that will be met with envy and admiration by his enemies and peers but quickly discovers that the same problems afflict him in the Old World as in the New. This is Pemulis's Don Draper mistake. Don was created by Dick Whitman's desire to get a fresh start and when the original mistaken identity was made following the true Don Draper's death in Korea, the dream of a new start became a reality for him and Dick/Don grabbed it. Don later tries again for a new start when he divorces Betty and begins anew with his second wife, Megan. Things go well for a while but Don is eventually pulled back to his philandering ways. Most recently, Don thinks that he can solve his problems by again running away and starting over by escaping to California and again starting over with Megan. Because of this belief that starting over can fix everything (as evidenced at least by these glaring examples), Don is understandably confused when both his true brother and his business partner Lane Pryce are offered chances by Don at starting over (his brother with $5,000 of Don's money and Lane with a chance to quietly resign after getting caught stealing money from the firm) and both end up killing themselves. Neither Don's brother nor Lane see starting over as a viable solution to their lives' problems. Don's realization that if he fled to California he would lose any chance at a relationship with his children is perhaps what ultimately could save him as it forces him to realize that escaping and starting over is not always a tenable solution. Despite all that, however, Pemulis is a complex creature (or at least he wishes he was), and he can really only come up with four or five or six times where he really thought giving up on one idea and taking up another to restart was the easiest or best avenue and therefore grabbed it. But it's an easy dream to fall for. Pemulis's next reboot will be different though he thinks.
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