Two
things immediately jumped out of this piece and grabbed my attention: diction
and structure. The first two words of this story are “The daddy,” which
immediately made me assume a child was serving as the narrator. The run-on
sentences and utter lack of paragraphs added to my notion that the primary speaker
was too young to have a firm grasp on syntax or grammatical rules. The continuous
flow of action contributed to a certain sense of frantic movements and panic,
but I felt the narrator’s tone remained steady throughout, giving the work an
eerie, silent ambiance. By the end, I felt that the child who had been burned
and died had been serving as our narrator all along, and I thought this was a
beautifully creepy touch by Wallace.
What is so haunting about this piece
is how accurately it depicts a family crisis. Though a bit stylized and somewhat
poetic even, the feeling of being in slow motion and not being able to hear
anything during a time of unfathomable tragedy was preserved in this piece, and
I felt it strike home with me. I also really admired how Wallace was able to
develop his characters almost solely through their actions rather than
descriptions. The father was particularly vivid on the page, yet most of what
Wallace tells us has to do with what the father does: assess the situation, put
his son in the sink, wrap him in a damp towel, and drive him to the emergency
room. While this is the primary mode of character development, there were also
powerful hints into the characters’ inner lives, and I loved how subtle yet
unmistakable so many of these were. All in all, this amounts to a story
wonderfully told and hauntingly compelling. I would love to incorporate Wallace’s
obvious talent for impactful brevity into my own writing in the future.
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