Response to David Foster Wallace's "Incarnations of Burned Children"

This short story is about two parents whose child was burned when a boiling pot of water was overturned on top of him.  The bulk of the story is about the panic of the daddy and the mommy and their efforts to try and calm the child down and get the boiling water off.

I read this piece in my Intro to Creative Writing class and it was definitely a hard read the first time through.  In reading it again, I was able to appreciate the construction of the story.  I could not think of a better way to make an urgent and panicky scene than to make it one giant paragraph with no dialogue and only from one point of view.  The long sentences are like stream of conscious and they can cover several different subjects before they end.

I really loved when he mimicked dialogue like on page 707, "the Mommy said their God's first name."  He didn't have to include quotes and a new paragraph because this was much more concise and effective. It kept up with the pace while still adding speaking details.  I liked how the one narrator did all of the assessing.  The only time we got emotion was in his analytical descriptions of the actions going on.  The diction Wallace used painted the picture and helped conjure the emotion in the reader more than any dialogue could have.

The ending for me is strange.  It is definitely juxtaposed against the use of the Mommy and the Daddy and other phrases is the story that sound like the Daddy is talking to a child.  From what I understand, the child died and this man is kind of creating a life in his imagination for their child.  One, however, that isn't entirely tangible.  And that is kind of how it may be to lose a child.  You can't ever reconcile what happened and you can't ever conjure up a concrete image of who the child is after years pass.

Such a sad, sad story but very nicely written.  I hate to say I enjoyed reading it again.