Response to David Foster Wallace’s “Incarnations of Burned Children” David Foster Wallace’s “Incarnations of Burned Children” is a haunting yet eye-opening story. In this short-story an inattentive mother and father experience the frightening scene of their baby son being scorched by a fallen pot of boiling water. The Daddy, at the time of the incident, was fixing a door hinge and instinctively rushes to aid his son and put him under cold water in the sink. Throughout the story the narrator gauges in and out of the mind of the Daddy while simultaneously adding lengthy descriptions of the frantic scene. I actually felt the intensity of the scene while reading this short story and it was almost as if I was in the scene thinking of ways to help…show more content… Usually an Incarnation is a spirit or deity that is living through a human body or it is one of a series of lifetimes spent on earth. The author could be alluding to the fact that the baby actually did die in the end and this was his incarnation which is his first life on Earth. I think the author was either trying to say that this child is going to be reincarnated because of his short period on Earth, or he is an incarnation of a previously burned child. His imagery is haunting in a way where it makes the reader question whether Wallace inferred the use of Incarnation as the end of this child’s life or just an unfortunate beginning. Wallace ends the story with saying “the child had learned to leave himself and watch the whole rest unfold from a point overhead,” (193) which, to me, sounds like he is an “incarnation” watching his own death or near-death in spirit form above himself. Wallace uses words such as “it” when referencing the boy, such as “lived its life” (193) and “it’s self soul”(193), which makes the reader think of the child more as a thing, referencing the “Incarnation” mentioned in the title, rather than human. In the end I believe the child is riding on the border of life and death when Wallace wrote “itself vapor aloft, falling as rain and then rising, the sun up and down like a
