"Incarnations of Burned Children" - David Foster Wallace

Music suggestion for this reading: Rona Nishliu - Suus

In "Incarnations of Burned Children," David Foster Wallace has created a story that almost anyone can relate to, not in the situational aspect of the piece but more along the lines of the characters that represent a different, almost-universal aspect of personhood. The child is in constant pain throughout the piece and responds by screaming, a violent cry for help that cannot necessarily come, even with the aide he does receive. The mother is panic. What can she do? What can she do? It's an automatic response to a situation one wasn't prepared for, and it's a dangerous position, especially for the one that is in pain.The father is action. He doesn't necessarily know what should be done, but he knows something needs to be done, and thus he acts to change the situation.

In this way, they are universals, traits that all people understand and all have likely experienced, possibly even all successively. The structure of the piece helps to confirm the ties these universals have to each other. Instead of breaking traits and thoughts into neat paragraphs and long but simple sentences, the piece is organized into one long paragraph that encompasses the whole story and ties every long, panicked sentence with the previous one. Everything is tied together into an inseparable package, becoming one organic scene that manages to incorporate seemingly-unimportant images in a way that makes them as indispensable as the scene that is playing in front of them.

Even the ending, which seems to indicate what happened to the child for the rest of his life, seems to be integrated organically, creating a oneness with the rest piece despite it being a statement of the rest of the child's life in half a sentence. In this way, the scene became like a defining moment in the child's life, possibly even the child's earliest memory that shapes how he sees the rest of his life.