"Incarnations of Burned Children" by David Foster Wallace

            “Incarnations of Burned Children” by David Foster Wallace is a short story that occurs within one contained scene, the scene of a baby that gets into a pot of boiling water and ends up horrifically burned. While the aftereffects are not explored in the story, there is sufficient evidence to assume the father of the child will become bitter toward the mother, who was in the kitchen when the baby got burned. The descriptions of the mother seem to contrast those of the father. While the father seems rightly afraid for the life of the baby, the mother seems doll-like, immobile, paralyzed by what has happened—making it seem like she has taken this tragedy too inwardly to be able to do anything for the child. I gathered from the ending that the child lives and grows up a very empty and depressed person, but I could also see the ending as a sign that the baby dies. It was unclear to me.

            The images in the story were really powerful, the language raw and unorganized, which really makes the reader feel the desperateness of the father. Small, seemingly unrelated details give the story a haunting feel, such as the eerie bird that spies on the scene from the yard, unaware of the tragedy that it is witnessing. I think this detail is particularly haunting, because it shows that the tragedy this family experiences is nothing to the bird; I think it leaves us with the idea that horrific things happen all the time but sometimes nobody is there to witness them.

            In the second half of the short story, there were some sentences that became jumbled and simply did not make sense. I’m not sure if they made sense in Wallace’s head or if he was trying to create that sense of desperateness, but I don’t think it was necessary to have jumbled sentences to do that.