A Brief Hideous Reaction

David Foster Wallace killed himself September 12th, 2008. I feel this to be an important point to remember while reading Incarnations of Burned, for this short story was not published until nearly nine months posthumously. The underlying problems of his depression, which were treated and deemed “fixed” by authority, were never truly understood until after his death. It is through his own fear and darkness that Wallace himself parallels the child in the story.

This is a terrible and morose story. Let’s get that out of the way first.

Wallace has taken some of the most morbid imagery and has written within a stream of consciousness not seen since the days of the beat generation. The story follows “The Daddy” and “The Mommy,” both connotations of an infant’s view toward his parents, trying to help heal their burning and dying child. There’s the Daddy moving with such haste that he doesn’t have time to stop and process the situation until the child is already lost. And then the Mommy, who ultimately does nothing but match her child’s screams with her own.

There’s an allusion towards religion I found throughout this piece as well. Both with the Mommy, who stood frozen, “invoking God,” and the Daddy “throwing a haymaker into the sky and cursing the world.” The common dogma of religions find an omnipresent being that is always there, yet never interacts with humanity. The Mommy is representative of that in here and again when she “calls out the name of her God” because she is there but does nothing.

The authority figures here believe they have fixed their child’s problems with some cold water, yet he still screams and they are getting somewhat annoyed now. Cold defeats hot, why is he still upset? The parents only tend to what is visible and on the surface; they do not think about that which is hidden, soaking in his diaper, slowly killing him. This might parallel the internal struggle of Wallace himself because it wasn’t a problem on the surface that people could fix with him, but a deep burning on the inside.

There’s also the metaphor of the door that is loosely hanging onto the house, which follows along with the child in its own demise. The door begins to lightly hang as the Daddy rushes into save the child. Midway through, the door is teetering, about to fall. And finally, at the end, the door crashes to earth as the child leaves it.

I honestly can’t determine what Wallace’s main point he’s trying to tell here. Is it that we die the same way we are born, kicking and screaming? No, because the child stops his screams and accepts his death, which is very Buddhist in nature.

Is it that religion and authority are never thorough enough in their quest to cure humanity? Or was it just a dark and disturbing story written by a man who was reaching the end of his own sanity? I believe it is a little of all the above.