"Incarnations of Burned Children"

And I was having such a nice day too. “Incarnations of Burned Children” is one of those pieces that instantly fills you with dread if you have already read it and keeps you on the edge of your seat if you haven’t. I can’t believe I forgot this story, but now that my memory has been jogged, this heart wrenching piece once again fills me with pure adrenalin fueled panic. The narrator describes a horrific scene between a mother, father, and their infant son during an accident involving spilled boiling hot water.

With the entire story crammed into roughly 9 sentences, the breathless pace Wallace sets for the reader is displayed in a stream of consciousness style as the plot develops around the family in peril. As the boy is being tended to, the stream opens up a lot of questions about who is to blame for this situation and raises the level of responsibility that comes with being a parent.

The ending is left open, we are unsure of the child’s fate, whether he lived or died, and it’s because of his unique level of style. One of the best lines delivered in my opinion is, “their baby’s diaper burned their hand and they saw where the real water’d fallen and pooled and been burning their baby all this time while he screamed for them to help him and they hadn’t…” (Wallace 707). This short is full of lines just as emotional as the example provided and Wallace fills his readers’ appetite for complex and powerful word choice.