Reading Response to Incarnations of Burned Children

In David Foster Wallace’s Incarnations of Burned Children we are taken on a journey of love, remorse and helplessness.  There are three characters in the story who are identified only by their roles: the Daddy, the Mommy, and the child.  At first, I was puzzled by the lack of names, but after reading the story, I realized that the story is not one that is limited to any particular characters, but one that has a universal appeal and touches the parent/caretaker in all of us.  The protagonist is the Daddy who is immediately plunged into action upon hearing the screams of his child.  He immediately takes in the scene in the kitchen.  He swiftly lifts his son out of a pool of boiling water into the sink and runs cold water over the child.  The child continues to scream and the Daddy blocks out “everything but purpose,” including the child’s screams and the budding anger at the Mommy.  He swaddles his child in a wet a towel and tries to calm him with a singsong voice.  Only when he sees a wisp of steam coming from the hem of the towel does he realize too late that he never thought to check the diaper where the real boiling water had fallen and was continuing to burn the screaming child.  At that moment, we realize that the Daddy is also the antagonist.  He is both the child’s rescuer as well as his tormenter.  All this time the child had been crying for his parents to help him, clutching at them in the air with his tiny hands, while they sang to him and unwittingly let him boil to death.  Okay, I am going to admit that I cried while I read this.  I am a mother and the absolute of horror of this scenario was gut wrenching.  But, we can all relate to the sense of sheer helplessness and remorse at the realization that we could have done more to alleviate a situation.  And, then there is the resulting self-loathing and self-doubt.  Why didn’t I think of all the possibilities?  For, if I had, the ending would have been different…

I also noted that the story was crafted in very few sentences – nine by my count.  Perhaps this is Wallace’s way of showing everything in slow motion.  The whole incident probably only took minutes, but it seemed longer because in those minutes/sentences, we also were plunged into the Daddy’s consciousness.  And, as we all know, when we are in a crisis, time seems to slow down while our minds become acutely aware of many things at once.

Finally, I tried to understand why Wallace chose to use the word “incarnations” in the title. I looked up the word in the dictionary.  Which meaning of the word is implied by the story?  Is it “the embodiment of a deity,” “an actual form of a quality,” or “time passed in a particular bodily form or state?”  So, far I haven’t been able to answer this.