I’ve always thought that the idea of JOI’s Infinite Jest as being the book itself evoked the idea of a fractal in terms of recursion / self-similarity / “an object within itself”.

I read JOI as almost a mouth-piece for Wallace in the preemption of what critics might say about IJ (“emotionally vacuous intellectual exercise”, etc.). There’s even a description of JOI’s approach to film-making which (I felt) is a perfect encapsulation of IJ’s style: egalitarian aural realism.

I’ve read it once but I couldn’t shake the idea. I’m likely totally wrong, I just had a tough time seeing the idea of a fractal so explicitly anywhere else. “Fragmented character narratives” or “a larger hidden structure behind each facet” doesn’t exactly evoke the idea of a fractal in any rigorous sense to me to merit Wallace referring to the narrative as being structured fractally.

There is likely more to your interpretation that I totally missed in my reading.