the burned/blank child and the parent's dread of a silent, vacated son — the father-fear behind the Entertainment
echoes
From: Incarnations of Burned Children
- Early text: The survivor "walked about and drew pay and lived its
life untenanted" — a body present, a self absent and blank. [p. 2]
- IJ echo: James Incandenza's parenting dread that his son has gone silent and
empty — the "professional conversationalist" he hires and disguises as, because,
as the boy reports, "Is Himself still having this hallucination I never speak"
(scene 005) — and the wraith's terror of the child as a figurant, the vision of
a person "leaving him trapped in himself, a figurant, mute and unmoving and
blank" (scene 175). The "burned child" untenanted and blank is the thing the
father fears his son has become.
- Weight: shared-preoccupation