the child who, under unbearable pain, "learned to leave himself" and lived "untenanted" — the…
echoes
From: Incarnations of Burned Children
- Early text: "the child had learned to leave himself and watch the
whole rest unfold from a point overhead"; thereafter "the child's body expanded
and walked about and drew pay and lived its life untenanted, a thing among
things, its self's soul so much vapor aloft". [p. 2]
- IJ echo: Don Gately's childhood: watching his mother's live-in ex-Navy M.P.
beat her on a schedule, a trauma he had "barely even been there to experience,
in terms of emotionally, in the first place", and that in sobriety he began "to
almost reexperience" (scene 092). The story's overhead-vantage escape from pain
is the same barely-present survival Gately narrates — and the story's scald even
supplies a verbal rhyme: his mother tried to ward off the blows "as if she were
beating out flames" (scene 092).
- Weight: shared-preoccupation