A Small, Good Thing

Raymond Carver
1983

Introduction

"A Small, Good Thing," an award-winning story by American short story writer and poet, Raymond Carver, was published in Carver's third major collection of stories, Cathedral, in 1983. In his first two collections, Carver had established himself as a new and compelling voice in American literature and a master of the short story form. In Cathedral, he took his craft to new levels of insight into the human condition. "A Small, Good Thing" is generally regarded as one of Carver's finest stories, in which he goes beyond the spare narratives and unrelieved bleakness of some of his earlier work. The story is about Scotty, an eight-year-old boy who dies three days after being hit by a car as he walks to school. In language that is simple on the surface but reveals a host of telling details, Carver depicts the grief of the parents and their quarrel and final reconciliation with a baker who was baking a birthday cake for Scotty. Although tragic and disturbing, "A Small, Good Thing" conveys a message of forgiveness, kindness, and the healing power of human community.

Author Biography

Raymond Carver was born on May 25, 1938, in Clatskanie, Oregon, the son of Clevie Raymond, a laborer, and Ella Beatrice Raymond, a homemaker. In 1941, the family moved to Yakima, Washington.

Carver's father was a great storyteller and also read aloud to his son. Carver later attributed his desire to become a writer to his father. During adolescence Carver enjoyed fishing, hunting, and baseball, but his main goal was to write. He graduated from Yakima High School in 1956 and the following year married Maryann Burk, who was sixteen years old. By 1958, they had a daughter and a son and had moved to Paradise, California, where Carver entered Chico State College. At Chico, Carver studied under the novelist John Gardner.

For the next decade or so, Carver worked at a series of low-wage jobs, including gas station attendant and hospital cleaner, in order to support his family while he also continued his education. He received a degree from Humboldt State College in 1963, after which he moved to Iowa and enrolled in the Iowa Writers' Workshop. But due to lack of money he was unable to finish the two-year program. He returned to California in 1964 and lived in Sacramento, where he continued to work at odd jobs for several years. In 1967, he filed for bankruptcy and also had a drinking problem, but he was beginning to make his mark as a writer. His story "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" was included in The Best American Short Stories, 1967. In 1968, his first book of poems, Near Klamath, was published, followed in 1970 by a second collection, Winter Insomnia.

In the early 1970s, Carver took on a series of temporary teaching positions, at the University of California at Santa Cruz, then University of California at Berkeley, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. However, teaching seemed to exacerbate Carver's alcohol abuse, and in 1974, he was fired from the University of California at Santa Barbara for failure to meet with his classes. He filed for bankruptcy again.

In 1976, Carver's first collection of stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, was published by McGraw-Hill to critical acclaim. However, Carver was still plagued by alcoholism and was hospitalized several times for treatment. He finally gave up alcohol in June 1977, and his life took a more positive turn. In that year, his second collection of stories, Furious Seasons, was published by Capra Press.

In 1981, Carver's third collection of stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, was published by Knopf. Critical praise was unanimous, and Carver was regarded as a master of the short story genre. In 1983, another collection of stories appeared, again published by Knopf. This was Cathedral, which contained the story "A Small, Good Thing." The book was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. "A Small, Good Thing" won an O. Henry Award and appeared in the Pushcart Prize annual.

In 1984, Carver, who had by this time divorced his first wife and was living with the poet Tess Gallagher, moved to Port Angeles, Washington. His collection of poetry, Where Water Comes Together with Water, was published by Random House in 1985, and another poetry collection, Ultramarine, appeared in 1986.

In 1987, Carver, who was a heavy smoker, was diagnosed with lung cancer. Two-thirds of his left lung was removed, but the cancer reappeared the following year. In June 1988, Carver married Tess Gallagher. He died of lung cancer on August 2 at his home in Port Washington.

Plot Summary

"A Small, Good Thing" begins on a Saturday afternoon in an unnamed American city. Ann Weiss, a young mother, drives to the shopping center and orders a chocolate cake for her son Scotty's eighth birthday, which will be on Monday. The baker is a taciturn man, and Ann does not take to him. He promises the cake will be ready on Monday morning.

On Monday morning, Scotty is walking to school with another boy when he steps off the curb at an intersection and is knocked down by a car. The car stops but when Scotty gets to his feet and looks as if he is all right, the car leaves the scene. Scotty walks home but then collapses on the sofa and loses consciousness. He is taken to the hospital, where he is diagnosed with mild concussion and shock. He is in a deep sleep, but Dr. Francis, his doctor, says this is not a coma. Ann and her husband, Howard, wait anxiously at the bedside.

That evening, Howard returns home to bathe and change clothes. As he walks in the door, the phone rings. A voice on the other end of the line says there is a cake that was not picked up. Howard does not know what the man is talking about and hangs up. While Howard is bathing, the phone rings again, but the caller hangs up without saying a word.

Howard returns to the hospital after midnight. Scotty has still not awakened, but Dr. Francis insists there is nothing to worry about and that he will wake up soon. A nurse comes in and checks on Scotty. She tells the parents he is stable. The parents are worried but try to reassure themselves. Dr. Francis examines Scotty and again says he is all right other than a hairline fracture of the skull. He is not, according to the doctor, in a coma; his sleeping is the restorative measure the body is taking in response to shock, and he should wake up soon.

The parents try to comfort each other. Both of them have been praying. An hour later, another doctor, Dr. Parsons, enters the room and tells the parents that they want to take more x-rays of Scotty, and they also want to do a brain scan. He explains that this is normal medical procedure. Scotty is wheeled out on a gurney. His parents accompany him to the x-ray department and then return with him to his hospital room.

They wait all day, but Scotty still does not wake up. Dr. Francis continues to assure them that the boy will wake soon, but Ann and Howard become increasingly anxious. On his next visit, Dr. Francis confesses that there is no reason why Scotty has not awakened yet, but he still insists the boy is in no danger. Pressed by Ann, he admits that Scotty is in a coma, but that all the signs are good.

Ann goes home to take a bath and feed the dog. On her way out of the hospital, she cannot find the elevator and enters a small waiting room in which a black man and his wife and teenage daughter are waiting for news of their son, Franklin. The man explains to Ann that Franklin was stabbed in a fight, even though he was not directly involved in it.

Ann returns home. At five o'clock in the morning, after she has just fed the dog, the phone rings. The man says a few words, mentioning a problem to do with Scotty, and then hangs up. Ann calls the hospital, but there has been no change in Scotty's condition. Howard thinks the caller may have been the same person who called him earlier. He wonders whether it might be the driver of the car who knocked Scotty down. Maybe the man is a psychopath and has somehow got hold of their telephone number, he suggests.

Just before seven in the morning, Ann returns to the hospital, where she inquires at a nurses' station about the condition of Franklin. A nurse informs her that Franklin died. When Ann enters Scotty's room, Howard tells her that the doctors have decided to run more tests on the boy. They are going to operate on him, since they do not know why he is not waking up. Just then Scotty opens his eyes and stares straight ahead, then at his parents. The parents are relieved and talk to him, but he does not respond. He opens his mouth and howls, then seems to relax, but stops breathing.

The doctors say that his death is caused by a hidden occlusion, and that it was a one-in-a-million chance. Dr. Francis is shaken and commiserates with Ann and Howard. He says there will be an autopsy.

At about eleven o'clock, the Weisses drive home and try to deal with their shock and grief. Ann calls her relatives; Howard goes outside to the garage, where he sits down and holds Scotty's bicycle. Then the phone rings, and it is once more the mystery caller, talking about Scotty. Ann swears at him and hangs up. She collapses over the table and weeps.

Much later, just before midnight, the phone rings. Howard answers, but the line goes dead. They both know that it is the same caller. Ann says she would like to kill him. Then she suddenly remembers the birthday cake and realizes that it has been the baker calling her to harass her for not collecting the cake.

Ann and Howard drive to the shopping center to confront the baker, even though it is about midnight. Ann knocks twice on the back door of the bakery. The baker comes to the door and recognizes Ann but says he is busy. He says he still has the three-day old cake and she can collect it if she wants to, for half-price. He repeats that he is busy and has to get back to work. Ann angrily tells him that Scotty is dead. She feels dizzy and begins to cry.

The baker's manner softens. He fetches two chairs and asks Ann and Howard to sit down. He sits down also and tells them how sorry he is about Scotty's death and sorry for his behavior, too. He asks them to forgive him. He makes them some coffee and offers them some fresh-baked cinnamon rolls. He says it is good to eat something in a time like this. Ann eats three rolls, and she and Howard listen as the baker tells them about his loneliness and what it feels like to be childless. He speaks of his repetitive, empty work as a baker, preparing for other people's celebrations. They talk until daylight, and neither Ann nor Howard thinks about leaving.

Characters

The Baker

The baker is a somber, taciturn man with an abrupt manner. He is probably in his fifties. When Ann orders the birthday cake from him, he will not chat or be friendly with her, and his behavior makes her uncomfortable. When Ann does not collect the birthday cake, the baker makes harassing phone calls to her home. But later he asks for forgiveness, acknowledging that he was in the wrong. It transpires that he is lonely and childless. In spite of the fact that he is constantly busy as a baker, he feels his life is empty. He has forgotten whatever dreams he may once have had for his life, but he shows some kindness and compassion for Ann and Howard.

The Black Man

The middle-aged black man waits at the hospital with his wife and daughter as his son Franklin undergoes an operation.

Dr. Francis

Dr. Francis is in charge of Scotty's treatment at the hospital. He is handsome, tanned, and wears a three-piece suit. His manner is reassuring and kind.

Dr. Parsons

Dr. Parsons works in the radiology department at the hospital.

Ann Weiss

Thirty-three year old, Ann Weiss is the wife of Howard and mother of Scotty. She lives a comfortable middle-class life and is devoted to raising her young son. Grief-stricken by his death, she is aroused to fierce anger by the behavior of the baker and goes to confront him. But she calms down as the baker talks, offers her something to eat and tells her of his life.

Howard Weiss

Howard Weiss, husband of Ann and father of Scotty, is well educated, with a graduate degree in business, and is junior partner in an investment firm. He is happy with his successful life. Nothing bad has happened to him until the accident involving Scotty.

Scotty Weiss

Scotty Weiss is the son of Howard and Ann Weiss. On the morning of his eighth birthday, he is walking to school when he steps off the curb at an intersection and is hit by a car. He walks home but collapses on the sofa. In the hospital he slips into a coma. After seeming to regain consciousness for a moment, he dies.

Themes

Compassion, Forgiveness, and Community

The death of Scotty is a heart-wrenching tragedy, but out of it, from the most unlikely of sources, comes compassion, the opportunity for forgiveness, and the creation of a sense of human community in the face of the suffering that is common to all.

The situation at the beginning of the story seems perfect. A loving mother orders a birthday cake for her young son's birthday party. What could be more representative in microcosm of the joys of human community than a birthday party for a child? Then comes the tragic accident, and the precariousness of human happiness is revealed.

Before her world is shattered, Ann Weiss shows herself to be a person who likes to make connections with others; she likes to communicate and be friendly. When she first encounters the baker, she tries to engage him in conversation, but he will not be drawn out of his gruff, taciturn manner. He makes no comment at all about the child and his birthday party. As Ann thinks about him, she seems subconsciously to search for some way in which she might connect with him. She seeks the common, human element, and thinks that because he is an older man, he must have children somewhere who must have had their cakes and birthday parties: "There must be that between them, she thought." But she is still unable to befriend him because he insists on keeping a mental wall between them.

A similar incident occurs later in the story, when Ann is in the midst of her family crisis. She still seeks connection with others, a bridge between separate, private worlds. When she meets the parents who are waiting for news of their son, Franklin, she wants to talk more with them, since they are in a situation similar to hers: "She was afraid, and they were afraid. They had that in common." She wants to tell them more about the accident to Scotty, but she does not know how to begin: "She stood looking at them without saying anything more." Again, even though she senses the connections between very different people—the family is black, the baker is much older than she—she is unable to articulate it or get others to feel it.

The emerging dynamic of the story is therefore between community and isolation, or between distance (separation) and communication and closeness. Ann and Howard are examples of closeness; they are a loving couple who had a warm family life with their young son. The sympathetic and kind Dr. Francis is also able to share in this sense of fellowship between humans. After Scotty's death, as Dr. Francis consoles Ann, "He seemed full of some goodness she didn't understand."

Topics For Further Study

• Do some Internet research on the medical condition known as coma and make a class presentation about it. What is a coma? What causes people to fall into a coma? Do people recover from comas? What treatment is given to people in a coma?
• Research the role played by food and the eating of food in religious rituals. What is the connection between food and spirituality? Why do many religions have dietary laws or restrictions? What purpose do they serve? You may use examples from any religious tradition. Write an essay that describes your findings.
• Write a poem based on "A Small, Good Thing." Try to convey the story and its theme in no more than 20-25 lines. Your poem can be in any form and told from any point of view. As an alternative, you could write the story as a song of maybe 5-6 verses. Remember that in either poem or song, you will not be able to include all the details that are found in the story. You need to pick out the most important elements and find ways of expressing them in the new form.
• Read the story "The Cathedral," by Carver, and write a short essay comparing it to "A Small, Good Thing." In what ways are the two stories similar? Which story do you prefer, and why?

But the baker places himself outside that circle of community. He does not permit himself to reach out to others. This is clear from his interaction with Ann at the beginning, but it becomes more pronounced in the phone calls he makes to the Weisses' home. At first, he is merely unlucky. It is quite reasonable for him to call and point out that the cake has not been collected; he just happens to catch Howard at the wrong time, and Howard knows no more about a birthday cake than the baker does of Scotty's accident. It is an unfortunate incident, ripe with misunderstanding, and demonstrates how easily in this story things can go wrong. But after this incident, the baker is more culpable. He allows his resentment that the cake has not been collected to fester, and he makes harassing calls. Unwittingly, he is completely at odds with what the situation demands; where empathy and compassion are called for, he offers only malice.

Only at the end of the story does this situation change. In the most unlikely of circumstances, the three people in the bakery manage to reach out to one another. This happens only after they reach an extreme of hostility and lack of understanding. It is the baker who makes the first move by apologizing, asking for forgiveness, and talking about his own frustrations and disappointments. They all learn that what they have in common is suffering. This is the bond that, when acknowledged, leads to compassion and understanding. The baker in his loneliness, and Ann and Howard in their grief, in the darkness of the night and the warmth of the bakery, create for themselves a renewal of the bonds of community through the simple ritual of sharing food.

Style

Setting

Other than the fact that the story appears to be set in the United States, there is a lack of specificity in the setting. The town is unnamed and could be anywhere. Also, there are few clues as to when the story takes place. It was published in 1983 but could as easily be set in 1963 or 2003. It seems to take place within a kind of bubble, without reference to anything larger than itself. The only clue comes when Ann refers to the black man and woman as Negroes, a term not much used to describe black people after the 1960s.

The lack of extraneous detail has the effect of making the stark drama and tragedy of the story stand out in sharper relief. As Carver once said in an interview with David Applefield: "My stories take place on a personal level as opposed to a larger political or social arena."

Symbolism

There is a suggestion of religious ritual in the way that the baker breaks the dark bread and shares it with Ann and Howard at the end of the story. It recalls the Catholic ritual of the Eucharist, in which the bread offered by the priest is believed to be the body of Christ. The incident is emphasized by the descriptions of the smell and taste of the bread and the physical action of eating ("They swallowed the dark bread"). The religious symbolism adds solidity and depth to this unexpected moment of communion between the three people, in which they are able to ease their troubles by sharing them. It is perhaps no coincidence that immediately afterwards, imagery of light appears twice: "It was like daylight under the fluorescent trays of light," and the three of them stay talking until the early morning, when "the high, pale cast of light in the windows" appears. The imagery of light suggests that even in the darkest tragedy, some hope is possible.

Historical Context

Minimalism

Carver's work is in the tradition of realism. When he began to publish his short stories in the 1970s, the dominant mode of literary fiction was not realism but what was sometimes called metafiction, a complex, experimental form that was as much about writing itself as about telling a story. This kind of postmodernist writing was practiced by writers such as Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut.

Carver was not attracted to this form, and he returned to the earlier literary tradition of realism, in which the writer is more interested in presenting mundane, everyday life as it is experienced by the ordinary person. However, Carver's realism was markedly different from its nineteenth-century form, in which the elements of fiction such as character and setting were described at length and in great detail.

In contrast, Carver's work is associated with the literary movement known as minimalism, which came to dominate American short story writing in the late 1970s and 1980s. The term is a problematic one and applies more to Carver's earlier stories, up to and including the collection, What We Talk about When We Talk about Love (1981), than to the more filled-out stories in Cathedral (1983).

Minimalism is a pared down form of realism that is often distinguished more by what it leaves out than what it puts in. Novelist and short story writer, John Barth, who is known as a maximalist rather than a minimalist, described it in the New York Times Book Review in 1986 as "terse, oblique, realistic or hyperrealistic, slightly plotted, extrospective, cool-surfaced fiction" (quoted in Randolph Paul Runyon's Reading Raymond Carver). In Understanding Raymond Carver, Arthur M. Saltzman defines minimalism as short fiction that features "flatness of narrative tone, extreme sparseness of story, an obsession with the drab and the quotidian, a general avoidance of extensive rumination on the page, and, in sum, a striking restraint in prose style."

Compare & Contrast

• 1980s: Carver writes mainly about people at the lower end of the socio-economic scale, and during the 1980s, the gap between the rich and the poor in the United States increases. Homelessness becomes a large social problem. It is caused by the lack of affordable housing, higher rates of joblessness, and reductions in public welfare programs that take place during the administration of President Ronald Reagan (1981–89).
  
  Today: Homelessness remains a social problem that successive governments fail to tackle. Housing prices continue to rise, and people working in minimum-wage jobs are increasingly unable to afford them. There are no accurate national figures on the number of homeless people in the United States. However, by way of example, in Los Angeles in 2005, an estimated 85,000 people experience homelessness every day, according to the Institute for the Study of Homelessness and Poverty at the Weingart Center, Los Angeles. In New York, an estimated 37,000 people are in shelters every night, according to the Coalition for the Homeless, New York. This figure is the highest number of homeless in New York since the Great Depression.
• 1980s: The plot of "A Small, Good Thing" turns on telephone calls received by the husband and wife. In the 1980s, not everyone has answering machines, and there are no features such as Caller ID. Cordless phones first appear around 1980. However, they have limited range and poor sound quality and can easily be intercepted by another cordless phone. In 1986, the Federal Communications Commission grants cordless phones a different frequency, but there are still problems with range and sound quality.
  
  Today: With features such as voice mail and call waiting, people have many ways of receiving telephone calls and messages. Cellular or wireless telephones are nearly as common as traditional wired telephones. Millions of people use them. They have an array of functions, enabling the user to store information, make to-do lists, keep track of appointments, send or receive email, get news and other information, and play simple games. According to a study commissioned by Motorola, cell phones are changing the way people live and work. The study finds that cell phones give people a sense of personal power. Young people in particular use cell phones to send text messages, often using what has been called "generation text," which incorporates abbreviations that young people all over the world recognize.
• 1980s: The number of deaths from motor vehicle accidents is lower than in the 1970s. The death rate falls further during the early years of the decade before rising again in every year from 1985 to 1988. In 1988, there are 48,900 deaths from motor vehicle crashes.
  
  Today: Deaths and injuries resulting from motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for persons of every age from two through thirty-three years of age (based on 2000 data). However, traffic fatalities are falling. In 2003, the fatality rate per 100 million vehicle miles of travel falls to a historic low of 1.48, with 42,643 people killed. Much of the decrease is attributable to increased use of seat belts and a reduction in the number of people who drive while over the legal limit for alcohol.

Minimalism has been used to describe a wide variety of writers, including, in addition to Carver, Frederick Barthelme, Ann Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason, James Robison, Mary Robison, Tobias Wolff, and others. But no writer labeled a minimalist has welcomed the term as a description of his or her work, and most writers would deny the existence of a single "minimalist school." Carver himself, although often regarded as a leader of the minimalists, rejected the term as applied to his work. In an interview (reprinted in Reading Raymond Carver), he told William L. Stull:

I'll be glad to see the appellation [minimalism] fade so that writers can be talked about as writers and not lumped together in groups where they usually don't belong. It's a label, and labels are unattractive to the people attached to the labels.

Carver also pointed out in the same interview that writers labeled as minimalists were very different from one another, a fact that tended to undermine the validity of the term.

By the late 1980s, the term minimalist was on the wane in critical discourse and there was even a backlash against it. Much of this was in reaction to writers of lesser talent than Carver who tended to imitate the form of his work without producing the same effect. Some critics argued that stories that adhered too closely to a minimalist style were deficient in terms of the range of emotions expressed and in depth of characterization.

Critical Overview

From its first publication in Cathedral in 1983, "A Small, Good Thing" was recognized by reviewers and critics as one of Carver's outstanding stories. In the New York Times Book Review, Irving Howe compares it to the earlier version of the story entitled "The Bath." He feels that teachers of creative writing who consider the earlier version superior, because of its tautness, cryptic nature, and symbolism, are wrong: "The second version, though less tidy and glittering, reaches more deeply into a human situation and transforms the baker from an abstract 'evil force' into a flawed human creature."

In the New Republic, Dorothy Wickenden singled out "A Small, Good Thing" as one of the best stories in the collection. She coupled it with the story "Cathedral," describing them both as "astute, even complex, psychological dramas." But she also criticized both stories for showing signs of sentimentality, and she ventured an opinion as to why this might be:

Perhaps because he doesn't quite trust the sense of hope with which he leaves his characters, the writing at the end becomes self-consciously simple and the scenes of resolution contrived. In "A Small, Good Thing" the stark realism of earlier scenes is replaced by rather pat symbolism about communion through suffering.

In the twenty years following its publication, "A Small, Good Thing" continued to attract attention from critics, who see it as an example of Carver's stylistic development from the sparse minimalism of the earlier stories to what Kathleen Westfall Shute in Hollins Critic has called "richer, more emotionally and artistically complex" work.

Criticism

Bryan Aubrey

Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentieth century literature. In this essay, Aubrey compares "A Small, Good Thing" to Carver's "The Bath," an earlier version of the story.

Literary critics have often agreed that the stories in Carver's collection, Cathedral, are less bleak, more hopeful, than the stories he published earlier in his career. Some critics have seen in "A Small, Good Thing" a tale of spiritual redemption. According to this view, Scotty is an innocent, suffering, Christ-like figure, and the final scene is a symbolic echo of the Last Supper in the Christian gospel. According to William Stull, in "Beyond Hopelessville: Another Side of Raymond Carver," this scene presents "a final vision of forgiveness and community rooted in religious faith." Those who read the story in this positive light sometimes suggest that Carver invests the number three with spiritual significance: Ann is thirty-three years old; Scotty dies on the third floor of the hospital, on the third day after his injury, just as Christ was crucified (possibly, according to scholars, at about the age of thirty-three), and rose from the dead on the third day. In the story, Ann and Howard Weiss both go home for brief periods to take baths, which could symbolize some kind of spiritual cleansing and rebirth (although it might also be pointed out that this would also be a perfectly natural thing to do under the circumstances).

Some readers may find these parallels with elements of the Christian tradition rather strained and point out that the universe depicted in "A Small, Good Thing" is hardly a comforting or just one. It might best be described as random. Scotty, for example, dies in what the doctor calls a "one-in-a-million" chance event; there is no merciful Father in heaven to save him, in spite of the fact that both his parents pray for their son's life. In the world depicted in the story, prayers are not answered, and bad things are likely to happen to anyone, even the innocent. Under the smooth surface of life, some unseen menace, some dark destiny, lurks. Howard, the father, is well aware of this possibility. After Scotty is injured, Howard reflects about his own life, which up to this point has been blessed with only good things, including a good education and a good job, a loving wife, and a son: "So far, he had kept away from any real harm, from those forces he knew existed and that could cripple or bring down a man if the luck went bad, if things suddenly turned." Howard thinks not in religious terms but in terms of "forces" and "luck." After the tragedy occurs, the Weisses, as would be expected, do everything they can to convince themselves that Scotty will recover; after all, that is what the doctor keeps telling them. But the doctor's frequent reassurances tend to have the opposite effect; the fear of the parents increases, and the reader senses that there will be no good outcome of this sad little tale. Indeed, when Scotty does die, it is a doubly cruel event, because in the few moments before his death he appears to wake up, giving his stricken parents some false hope that is quickly dashed. In this bleak and cruel world, all people can do is reach out to one another, comfort one another, and try to endure, as the baker and the Weisses do in the end. It is hard to see in what sense this might be considered a story which culminates in an expression of "religious faith," since there appears to be no God and nothing in which to have faith.

Interestingly, "A Small, Good Thing" was a revised version of "The Bath," a story that appeared in Carver's earlier collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981). An examination of this story and the changes Carver made for the later version sheds light on Carver's developing craft and the effect he may have intended to create in "A Small, Good Thing."

"The Bath" is an excellent example of what is meant by minimalism. It is less than one-third of the length of "A Small, Good Thing," and although it has basically the same plot as the later story, the narrative is far more sparse and is stripped of all detail. Scotty does not die, but his fate remains unknown as he lies in the hospital; Ann does not have her angry confrontation with the baker, and there is no final scene of reconciliation.

In "The Bath," Ann Weiss is not named until late in the story. At first she is merely described as the mother, and at various other times, she is the wife and the woman. Her age is not stated. The husband, Howard in the later story, is not named at all. He is simply called the father, the man, or the husband. The details of his personal life that appear in the later story (that he is a partner in an investment firm, that his parents are alive, and his brothers and his sister are all doing well) are only very briefly mentioned in "The Bath." Neither of the two doctors is named either. The second doctor is presented in this way: "A doctor came in and said what his name was. This doctor was wearing loafers." In the later story, the doctor is given a name, Parsons, and described in a little more detail: "He had a bushy mustache. He was wearing loafers, a Western shirt, and a pair of jeans." In "The Bath" the family that Ann sees in the waiting room at the hospital mentions only the name Nelson. They do not tell her, as in the later story, that Franklin, as he is now named, is their son and he was stabbed during a fight in which he was an innocent bystander. The story thus has a more impersonal quality than the later version. It is told by a narrator who seems very distant from the characters he observes, and the characters themselves display a limited range of emotions. They do not connect emotionally with others.

In an interview with Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory, Carver explained that in "The Bath," he wanted to emphasize the quality of menace, and this was why the story was so compressed and condensed. Menace is conveyed, for example, in the description of the husband as he returns home to take a bath after being at Scotty's bedside for hours: "The man had been lucky and happy. But fear made him want to take a bath." It is as if fear is something that clings to the skin and can be washed away, or so the man mistakenly hopes. The story ends on another note of menace. Ann answers the telephone and hears the voice of the baker, although she does not know who it is: "'Scotty,' the voice said, 'It is about Scotty,' the voice said. 'It has to do with Scotty, yes.'" The repetitions, with no further explanation given, create a menacing effect, sounding for Ann perhaps like a disembodied voice of doom for her son.

Carver liked to give his stories this quality of menace because he believed that many people feel insecure about their own lives, fearing that something could come along at any moment and destroy whatever they have.

However, after publication of "The Bath," Carver felt that the story needed to be "enhanced, redrawn, reimagined" (interview with McCaffery and Gregory). He ended up revising it so thoroughly that he considered "The Bath" and "A Small, Good Thing" to be entirely different stories, and he said that he liked the revised story much better than the original.

What Carver did in the revision was not so much create a religious framework for the story as humanize it. The quality of menace, the sense that something bad is going to happen, remains. In one respect, this feeling has been increased, since there are now two innocent victims rather than one. In addition to Scotty, there is Franklin, who, the later story explains, was at a party minding his own business when he was attacked: "Not bothering nobody. But that don't mean nothing these days," says his father. A world in which minding one's own business does not spare him from the aggression of others is a menacing one indeed.

Given that Carver had no wish to remove the sense of menace that hovers over the story, almost every change and addition he made to the original story resulted in a more complex and sympathetic portrayal of human emotions. In "The Bath," the characters seem to live in their own small, circumscribed worlds, like orbiting planets that make no contact with each other. But in "A Small, Good Thing" they are more willing, and often able, to reach out to others to alleviate the pain of the common human condition.

This ability to connect is apparent, for example, in Ann's greater awareness of her husband's fear and grief. After Howard tells her that he has been praying, just as she has, she reflects:

For the first time, she felt they were together in it, this trouble. She realized with a start that, until now, it had only been happening to her and to Scotty. She hadn't let Howard into it, though he was there and needed all along. She felt glad to be his wife.

To be together, not alone, in trouble sums up the essence of "A Small, Good Thing." It is revealed in the climactic scene of reconciliation at the end and also in other small details that appear in the later story but not in "The Bath." Dr. Francis, for example, who is presented in "The Bath" as a handsome man and a snappy dresser—a man seen from the outside only—retains those qualities but adds an inner dimension of warmth, empathy, and compassion. He embraces Ann and tries to console her, and he puts his arm around Howard's shoulders. These gestures too, are small, good things; they are the most the doctor can do in this tragic situation. Of course, these gestures, and the "small, good thing" of eating in the company of others, are not enough, for there is nothing that can remove the grief that results from the death of a child. Nonetheless, such gestures are not in vain. They are like candles lit in the darkness, and in grief as in despair, even the tiniest ray of light can help to dispel the gloom.

Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on "A Small, Good Thing," in Short Stories for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

Arthur M. Saltzman

In the following essay excerpt, Saltzman explores the "reformulation" and evolution of Carver's earlier story, "The Bath," as "A Small, Good Thing" in the Cathedral collection.

What Do I Read Next?

• Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976) was Carver's first major collection of short stories. The stories feature blue collar characters struggling to deal with problems such as alcoholism, adultery, and despair. Many of the themes that recur in Carver's later collections appear here for the first time: the failure of people to communicate with each other, how people contrive to mismanage their lives, how people survive what happens to them and come to terms with their limitations.
• Carver admired the work of Bobbie Ann Mason. Midnight Magic: Selected Stories of Bobbie Ann Mason (1998) is a collection of seventeen stories from two previous collections by Mason, who like Carver has been labeled a minimalist by critics. Like Carver, Mason focuses on working-class life. Her characters live on the edge of poverty, often unemployed or in insecure employment, in rural and small-town Kentucky. Dubbed Kmart realism, Mason's is a world of chain stores, shopping malls, and cable television. Her characters have to deal as best they can with social changes and dislocations such as those caused by factory lay-offs and higher divorce rates.
• Readers may enjoy Ann Beattie's Park City: New and Selected Stories (1999). Beattie made her reputation in the 1970s as a writer of minimalist short stories that were published in the New Yorker. Some critics see her, with Carver, as being responsible for the renaissance of the short story form in the 1970s and 1980s. This is her fifth collection of stories, although all but eight of them had been previously published in book form. Unlike the settings in stories by Carver and Mason, Beattie's terrain is the urban (usually New York), educated middle class. Her characters often seem to have no real purpose or sense of destiny; small details about their lives accumulate, but the larger meaning is up to the reader to discover, if it exists.
• Tobias Wolff has sometimes been linked to Carver as a so-called minimalist, and Carver, who was generous in his praise of other writers, named Wolff as a writer he greatly admired. Wolff also admired Carver's work, and they were for a while colleagues in Syracuse University's Creative Writing Program. Wolff's collection of stories The Night In Question: Stories (1997) has been praised for its presentation of moral ambiguities, for it tension building, and for descriptions of how people respond to what fate brings them.

The stories discussed above follow the general tone established in Carver's three previous collections. The absence of recourse and the unnourished hopes shrunken to a grudge; the misfired social synapses and the implied ellipses like breadcrumb trails leading from breakdown to breakdown; the "preseismic" endings that "are inflected rather than inflicted upon us"; the speechless gaps where intimacies are supposed to go—these characteristics persist. On the other hand, some of the stories in Cathedral do suggest an opening out that indicates, however subtly, an ongoing evolution in Carver's art.

The reformulation of "The Bath" in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love as "A Small, Good Thing" in Cathedral is an obvious place to begin to examine this contrast. Carver himself has indicated that the enhancement of the original story's "unfinished business" is so fundamental that they now seem to him to be two entirely different stories. Certainly the structure of his sentences has been changed in several instances to be less fragmentary, less constrained. For example, while she is waiting for the arrival of the doctor in "The Bath," the mother's dread is nearly wordless, and absolutely privatized: "She was talking to herself like this. We're into something now, something hard." In "A Small, Good Thing," however, Ann (she has been granted a name and a fuller identity, as have the other characters in the story) is presented as having a more extensively characterized consciousness, which is thus more sympathetic and accessible:

She stood at the window with her hands gripping the sill, and knew in her heart that they were into something now, something hard. She was afraid, and her teeth began to chatter until she tightened her jaws. She saw a big car stop in front of the hospital and someone, a woman in a long coat, get into the car. She wished she were that woman and somebody, anybody, was driving her away from here to somewhere else, a place where she would find Scotty waiting for her when she stepped out of the car, ready to say Mom and let her gather him in her arms.

In a little while, Howard woke up. He looked at the boy again. Then he got up from the chair, stretched, and went over to stand beside her at the window. They both stared at the parking lot. They didn't say anything. But they seemed to feel each other's insides now, as though the worry had made them transparent in a perfectly natural way (my italics).

With the expansion of the original version comes a development of the spiritual cost of the crisis. The result of every extension of detail in "A Small, Good Thing"—from the increased dimension of the baker when he is first introduced, to the transcendence of merely symbolic function of the black family at the hospital—is to decrease the distances that separate Carver's characters from one another and Carver's narrator from the story he relates. For one critic the expansion represents a movement away from "existential realism" toward a comparatively coherent, more dramatic, and more personal "humanistic realism."

Carver's most profound revision is to carry the plot beyond the state of abeyance of Scotty's coma. ("The Bath" concludes in the middle of the phone call, just before the "death sentence" is actually pronounced.) In "A Small, Good Thing," Scotty's death spasm occurs even as the doctor is discussing with the parents the surgery that he will perform to save the boy. Having been assured only the previous day that Scotty would recover, Ann and Howard are absolutely overwhelmed, and they dazedly prepare to withstand the autopsy, to call relatives. Under these more developed circumstances the baker's call is no longer just the ironic plot gimmickry it had been in "The Bath"; instead, his interruption of and ultimate participation in the family's loss in "A Small, Good Thing" precipitates the cycle of "dramatic recognition, reversal, confrontation, and catharsis" that finally gives the story the finished contours of tragedy—the "low-rent" tragic pattern fleshed out to classic dimensions. Replacing the blank, dazed reaction of the anxious mother in the former version is her wild anger at the "evil bastard" who has blundered into their grief; when translated to the context of their open wound, his message about the birthday cake sounds ominous and malicious: "'Your Scotty, I got him ready for you,' the man's voice said. 'Did you forget him?'"

He hangs up, and only after a second call and hang-up does Ann realize that it must have been the baker. Blazing with outrage, desperate to strike out against their defeat, Ann and Howard drive to the shopping center bakery for a showdown. The baker, menacingly tapping a rolling pin against his palm, is prepared for trouble, but Ann breaks down as she tells him of the death of her son. Her debasement is complete, but Carver rescues her from the isolated defeat in which so many of his previous protagonists have been immured. The baker apologizes, and in that instant's compassion is moved to confess his misgivings and his loneliness, and the cold remove he has kept to: "I'm not an evil man, I don't think. Not evil, like you said on the phone. You got to understand what it comes down to is I don't know how to act anymore, it would seem." Their shared bond is inadequacy in the face of loss, joined by a need to be forgiven for that inadequacy. Consequently, whereas in previous stories people clutched themselves in isolated corners against their respective devastations, here they manage to come together in the communal ceremony of eating warm rolls and drinking coffee: "You have to eat and keep going. Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this."

The availability of nourishment discloses their common "hunger." Ann, Howard, and the baker begin a quiet convalescence, eating what they can, talking until morning. Unlike "The Bath," whose focus is the title's solitary baptism, a purgative reflex meant to ward off catastrophe, "A Small, Good Thing" affirms the consolations of mutual acceptance. Ann and Howard had refused food throughout the story, which suggested their desperate denial. The closing scene "exteriorizes" their misery so as to make available to them the healing impulses of the baker and the small, but significant, brand of grace that human sympathy can provide.

Source: Arthur M. Saltzman, "Cathedral," in Understanding Raymond Carver, University of South Carolina Press, 1988, pp. 143-47.

Mark A.R. Facknitz

In the following essay, Facknitz explores the unexpected and redemptive understanding that comes upon the protagonists of Carver's "A Small, Good Thing," "The Calm," and "Cathedral."

Raymond Carver is as successful as a short story writer in America can be. The signs of his success are many: prestigious and ample grants, publication in the best literary quarterlies and national magazines, and, from all appearances, an unperturbed ability to write the kind of stories he wishes to write. By contrast, the causes of his success are ambiguous. Carver's writing is often facile, and one might argue that he has chanced upon a voice that matches a jaded audience's lust for irony and superficial realism. Whatever the proclivities of his readers, Carver knows their passions and perversions well. In story after story, in language that babbles from wise lunatics, Carver's penetration of characters is honest and fast. But they compose a diminished race—alcoholics, obsessives, drifters, and other losers who are thoroughly thrashed by life in the first round. Only recently have his characters begun to achieve a measure of roundness, and as they have, the message of his work has shifted considerably. Once all one could draw from Carver's work was the moral that when life wasn't cruel it was silly. In several key stories since 1980, he has revealed to readers and characters alike that though they have long suffered the conviction that life is irredeemably trivial, in truth it is as profound as their wounds, and their substance is as large as the loss they suffer.

In their essay on Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1977), Carver's first major collection of stories, David Boxer and Cassandra Phillips call Carver's world one of "unarticulated longing, a world verging on silence" in which people speak with the "directionless quality, the silliness, the halting rhythm among people under the influence of marijuana," (80-81) and they rightly call such speech "realistic language of a different sort—a probe stuck beneath the skin of disassociation itself" (81). Indeed, it is hard for Carver's characters to say what they mean under any circumstances. Often they try to rephrase their ideas for inattentive listeners, who are as likely as they to be dulled by drugs, alcohol, and over-eating. Thus speech is stuporous and communication far from perfect. However, for Boxer and Phillips "passivity is the strength of this language: little seems to be said, yet much is conveyed" (81) and they compare the simplicity of Carver's dialogue to Pinter's and write of "emotional violence lurking beneath the neutral surfaces." One could go further and assert that in his early stories Carver's obsessive subject is the failure of human dialogue, for talking fails in all but the title story of Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, and that story's message is that sometimes the best thing we can say is nothing.

The theme of failed speech is only slightly less domineering in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981). An important exception is "The Calm." In the story, the narrator watches and listens from a barber chair while a drama unfolds. Its cast is composed of two pairs. In the first pair is Charles, a bank guard, who tells the men in the shop of having wounded a buck the day before, and old Albert, dying of emphysema, who is offended by Charles's brutality. Opposite them is a pair of men without names, the barber and the man with the newspaper. As the owner of the shop, the barber represents order and tranquility, while the other man is a nervous type who exacerbates the tension that develops between Charles and Albert. In allegorical terms the story combines Cruelty (Charles) and Disruption (the man with the newspaper) and makes them the antagonists of Humanity (Albert) and Order (the barber). The plot, then, is very simple: Disruption meddles in the inevitable conflict between Cruelty and Humanity and then step by step Order re-asserts itself. Thus calm is bestowed upon Order's client, the narrator in the barber chair, the witness or internal audience who has played no part in the drama but for whom the moral comes clear.

This primary narrator at moments gives way to a secondary narrator, the guard Charles, as he tells the story of the hunt which he undertook with his hungover son, a young man with a weak stomach and a worse aim. Scarcely a nimrod, Charles is defined by his doltishness and vulgarity. He tells of wounding the buck:

It was a gut shot. It just like stuns him. So he drops his head and begins this trembling. He trembles all over. The kid's still shooting. Me, I felt like I was back in Korea. So I shot again but missed. Then old Mr. Buck moves back into the bush. But now, by God, he doesn't have any oomph left in him. The kid has emptied his g―d― gun all to no purpose. But I hit solid. I rammed one right in his guts. That's what I meant by stunned him.

In fact, the hemorrhaging animal has plenty of oomph left in him. Though father and vomiting son follow a gory track, by nightfall they haven't caught up with the wounded deer and abandon him to slow death and scavengers. Inept and immoral, the two renounce an obligation, one that a man of Albert's fiber would likely call sacred. Charles confuses hunting with war, and in doing so he travesties the deepest symbolism of the hunt and idiotically confuses the archetypes of violence and necessity. Yet one sees a measure of perverse respect in his assumption that a bullet in the intestines amounts to nothing more than stunning. This offends Albert, and he tells Charles "You ought to be out there right now looking for that deer instead of in here getting a haircut." In other words, Albert asserts a principle that ought to be self-evident to an American man: hunting is not war; the animal is not an enemy to be loathed and tortured. Albert reminds him of his duty to administer a coup de grace and then, by butchering and eating the animal, justify the creature's fear and death.

That such a message is implied by Albert's straightforward statement is clear from Charles's retort: "You can't talk like that. You old fart. I've seen you someplace." In a way his indignation is appropriate. Albert breaks a cultural rule as surely as the guard did in letting the wounded buck wander off. Moreover, in an American barbershop an egalitarian law inheres, and on entering one accepts a kind of truce similar to the set of restraints entering a church entails as one puts aside particulars of class and values. American males in their unspoken codes have reserved parking lots, alleys, bars, committee rooms, and the margins of athletic fields for physical and verbal violence, and they are likely to find arguments in barbershops as unsociable as spitting in a funeral parlor. Thus, the greatest deviant is the stranger with the newspaper, for his motive is malicious delight in causing trouble, in particular the disruption of the conventions of order. He is an "outside agitator" who brings out the worst in Charles and Albert, makes them breech the truce implied by the setting, and finally is more culpable than they for theirs are crimes of passion rather than malice. Albert is overpowered by righteous indignation, and Charles by the humiliation of being accused of breaking the masculine code of the hunt. The stranger defends nothing; rather, he seeks pleasure by provoking others.

The argument ends very soon, for once the barber asserts himself he easily vanquishes the man with the newspaper. First Charles leaves, complaining of the company, and then Albert goes, tossing off the comment that his hair can go without cutting for a few more days. Left with no one on whom to work his irascibility, the man with the newspaper fidgets. He gets up and looks around the shop, finds nothing to hold his attention, and then announces that he is going and disappears out the door. What has happened is not clear but the barber is nonplussed. Although he sides with Albert, allowing that after all Albert had provocation, the barber was forced to keep the peace and has lost a line-up of clients. Temporarily in a bad humor, he says to the narrator, who has said and done nothing all along, "Well, do you want me to finish this barbering or not?" in a tone that suggests to the narrator that the barber blames him for what has occurred.

The ill-feeling does not last. The barber holds the narrator's head and bends close and looks at him in the mirror while the narrator looks at himself. Then the barber stands and begins to rub his fingers through his hair, "slowly, as if thinking about something else," and "tenderly, as a lover would." The story is close to its end, and suddenly the reader has material before him that in no manner impinges on the events of the story and which, at first glance, appears irrelevant:

That was in Crescent City, California, up near the Oregon border. I left soon after. But today I was thinking of that place, of Crescent City, and of how I was trying out a new life there with my wife, and how, in the barber's chair that morning, I had made up my mind to go. I was thinking today about the calm I felt when I closed my eyes and let the barber's fingers move through my hair, the sweetness of those fingers, and the hair already starting to grow.

Much was transpiring in the heart and mind of the narrator—who is also the internal audience—but in the long run only the general fact that he was coming to an important decision matters. Revealing the particulars of his life that bear upon the decision would shift the focus of "The Calm" from how we receive blessings from others to the use such blessings are to us. This would trivialize and demystify the story, for Carver means to imply that while important gifts can only be given to those ready to take them, we cannot give them to ourselves. They come from outside of us from barbers whose names we never learn, or, as "A Small, Good Thing" and "Cathedral" will show, from bakers and blind men whom coincidence brings into our lives. Once we read the final paragraph of "The Calm," we assume that the narrator was in a turbulent state of mind while making an ostensibly objective record, and though we see nothing of the process except the external sequence, we guess that what he witnesses makes him better able to bring order into his life. Hair grows out, and calm does not last, but the barber proves to the narrator that he cannot create order by himself, though, like Albert, who has developed a sour temper and has trouble breathing in old age, he can always let the matter go a few more days.

Procrastination is occasionally impossible. In "A Small, Good Thing," one of the best stories in the most recent collection, Cathedral (1984), Ann and Howard Weiss confront the destruction of wellbeing. Because they dare to confront the catastrophe of their son's death, they are rescued, in this case by their principal malefactor.

One Saturday Ann orders a birthday cake for a party for her son which will take place Monday afternoon. Monday morning the boy is struck by a car while walking to school. At first he appears little hurt, and walks home, but suddenly he loses consciousness and over several days his condition worsens as sleep subsides into coma and at last he dies. Meanwhile doctors, nurses, and technicians come and go, offering encouragement to the parents and looking for clues to why the boy won't wake. Each time the doctor revises his opinion of the boy's condition, Ann guesses the truth, and the discrepancy between what she is told and what actually happens broadens as the story advances. Yet the doctors are not lying. Their reason and their tests are deceiving them, and all the hypotheses, diagnoses, X-rays, and scans fail to reveal "a hidden occlusion," a "one-in-a-million circumstance," that kills the child. Thus, while all the rational and objective ways of making sense are defeated, the truth persists in the mother's worst intuitions. When the boy dies, the doctors need an autopsy because things need explaining, and they must satisfy the need to know why their minds and machines failed. The parents must make sense in another way. They must voice an unspeakable grief, and they accomplish this by listening to someone else's suffering.

Early in the story Ann goes to the baker, a man who will torment her more than he can guess. Carver develops the scene:

She gave the baker her name, Ann Weiss, and her telephone number. The cake would be ready on Monday morning, just out of the oven, in plenty of time for the child's party that afternoon. The baker was not jolly. There were no pleasantries between them, just the minimum exchange of words, the necessary information. He made her feel uncomfortable, and she didn't like that. While he was bent over the counter with the pencil in his hand, she studied his coarse features and wondered if he'd ever done anything else with his life besides be a baker.

Much later in the story, while Ann sits by the phone after having called relatives to tell them of the boy's death, the baker phones. He has made several calls in the last few days—it was impossible to say precisely how many—and Howard and Ann have taken the calls as perverse jokes on the part of the hit-and-run driver. Through misapprehension, the cake and the boy come to have the same name, and the baker speaks in malicious metaphor when he says to the desperate woman, "Your Scotty, I got him ready for you. Did you forget him?" This is language of an extraordinary kind. No longer "minimum exchange, or the necessary information," such an utterance is a linguistic perversion for it means most when misunderstood.

When it occurs to Ann that the baker is her tormentor, she and her husband rush down to the shopping center and beat on the back door in the middle of the night until the baker lets them in. There she lights into him:

"My son's dead," she said with a cold, even finality. "He was hit by a car Monday morning. We've been waiting with him until he died. But, of course, you couldn't be expected to know that, could you? Bakers can't know everything can they, Mr. Baker? But he's dead. He's dead, you bastard!" Just as suddenly as it had welled in her, the anger dwindled, gave way to something else, a dizzy feeling of nausea. She leaned against the wooden table that was sprinkled with flour, put her hands over her face, and began to cry, her shoulders rocking back and forth. "It isn't fair," she said.

Nothing here can be misunderstood. The facts are plain, and the steps in her understanding of what bakers can and cannot know are clear and logical. Her anger is pure, and purifying: it is as physical and overpowering as the nausea that succeeds it, and the emotion and the sensation are as honest and undeniable as her recognition that her son's death was not fair.

Her speech abolishes the social conventions, suspicions, and errors that brought them to the point of confrontation. Ann, Howard, and the baker are tangled in a subtle set of causes, and Carver suggests again, as he has in many stories (e.g. "The Train," "Feathers"), that through imperceptible and trivial dishonesties we create large lies that can only be removed by superhuman acts of self-assertion. In response to Ann's overwhelming honesty, the menaced baker puts down his rolling pin, clears places for them at the table, and makes them sit. He tells them that he is sorry, but they have little to say about their loss. Instead they take the coffee and rolls he serves them and listen while he tells them about his loneliness and doubt, and about the ovens, "endlessly empty and endlessly full." They accept his life story as consolation, and while eating and listening achieve communion. Carver ends the story at dawn, with hope, and pushes forward symbols of sanctified space and the eucharist:

"Smell this," the baker said, breaking open a dark loaf. "It's a heavy bread, but rich." They smelled it, then he had them taste it. It had the taste of molasses and coarse grains. They listened to him. They ate what they could. They swallowed the dark bread. It was like daylight under the fluorescent trays of lights. They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.

Carver's characters rarely achieve a transcendent acceptance of their condition as does Ann Weiss. Indeed, more commonly they resign themselves without struggle or thought. They are rarely attractive people, and often readers must work against a narrator's tendency to sound cretinous or Carver's propensity to reveal characters as bigots and dunces. As the story opens, the first-person narrator of "Cathedral" appears to be another in this series of unattractive types. He worries about the approaching visit of a friend of his wife, a blind man named Robert who was once the wife's employer. He has little experience with the blind and faces the visit anxiously. His summary of the wife's association with Robert is derisive, its syntax blunt and its humor fatiguing:

She'd worked with this blind man all summer. She read stuff to him, case studies, reports, that sort of thing. She helped him organize his little office in the county social service department. They'd become good friends, my wife and the blind man. How do I know these things? She told me. And she told me something else. On her last day in the office, the blind man asked if he could touch her face. She agreed to this. She told me he ran his fingers over every part of her face, her nose—even her neck! She never forgot it. She even tried to write a poem about it. She was always writing a poem. She wrote a poem or two every year, usually after something really important happened to her.

Clearly he is jealous, and so emphasizes the eroticism of the blind man's touch. But she was leaving the blind man's office to marry her childhood sweetheart, an officer in the Air Force whom the narrator refers to as "this man who'd first enjoyed her favors," and much of his jealousy toward the first husband transfers to the blind man Robert. Thus Robert sexually threatens the narrator, with his blindness, and by virtue of being a representative of a past that is meaningful to the wife. The narrator is selfish and callous; however, he is one of Carver's heavy drinkers and no reader could be drawn through "Catheral" because he cares for him, and perhaps what pushes one into the story is a fear of the harm he may do to his wife and her blind friend. Yet Carver redeems the narrator by releasing him from the figurative blindness that results in a lack of insight into his own condition and which leads him to trivialize human feelings and needs. Indeed, so complete is his misperception that the blind man gives him a faculty of sight that he is not even aware that he lacks.

The wife and blind man have kept in touch over the years, a period of change and grief for each, by sending tape recordings back and forth. The life of a military wife depressed the young woman and led to her divorce from her first husband, but the narrator's view of her suffering is flat and without compassion:

She told the blind man she'd written a poem and he was in it. She told him that she was writing a poem about what it was like to be an Air Force officer's wife in the Deep South. The poem wasn't finished yet. She was still writing it. The blind man made a tape. He sent her the tape. She made a tape. This went on for years. My wife's officer was posted to one base and then another. She sent tapes from Moody AFB, McGuire, McConnell, and finally Travis, near Sacramento, where one night she got to feeling lonely and cut off from people she kept losing in that moving-around life. She balked, couldn't go it another step. She went in and swallowed all the pills and capsules in the medicine cabinet and washed them down with a bottle of gin. Then she got in a hot bath and passed out.

But instead of dying she got sick. She threw up.

Suicide is mundane, for him merely a question of balking at life, and dying is roughly the equivalent to throwing up, something one might do instead, much as the narrator stays up nights drunk and stoned in front of the television as an antidote to the "crazy" dreams that trouble his sleep. To his credit, he does not claim moral superiority to his wife, and sees the waste of his drinking and the cowardice of stayng in a job he can neither leave nor enjoy. He is numb and isolated, a modern man for whom integration with the human race would be so difficult that it is futile. Consequently he hides by failing to try, anesthetizes himself with booze, and explains away the world with sarcasm. He does nothing to better his lot. Rather he invents strategies for keeping things as they are and will back off from even the most important issues. When he wisecracks that he might take the blind man bowling, his wife rebukes him: "If you love me, you can do this for me. If you don't love me, okay. But if you had a friend, any friend, and the friend came to visit, I'd make him feel comfortable." Each ignores that she says him, not her, and the emotional blackmail of "if you don't love me, okay" appears not to register. He responds that he hasn't any blind friends, and when she reminds him that he hasn't any friends at all, much less blind ones, he becomes sullen and withdraws from the conversation. What she has said is aggressive and true and to respond to it would imply recognition of the many and large insufficiencies of his life. Instead, he works away at a drink and listens while she tells him about Beulah, the blind man's wife who has recently died of cancer. There's no facing this subject. He listens for a while as she talks about Beulah:

"Was his wife a Negro?" I asked.

"Are you crazy?" my wife said. "Have you just flipped or something?"

She picked up a potato. I saw it hit the floor, then roll under the stove.

"What's wrong with you?" she said. "Are you drunk?"

"I'm just asking," I said.

Right then my wife filled me in with more detail than I cared to know. I made a drink and sat at the kitchen table to listen. Pieces of the story began to fall into place.

Death is a subject they touch on often but never pursue, and they go on as married couples do in Carver's stories, never forcing a point because each hurt touches on another hurt. Thus, because each serious effort risks the destruction of a stuporous status quo that he maintains by various strategies of denial, they never touch each other.

The narrator inadvertently makes a friend of the blind man. At the end of an evening of whiskey and conversation that bewilder him and leave him sitting alone in his resentment, he is left with Robert when his wife goes upstairs to change into her robe. Together they sit, the narrator watching the late news, Robert listening, his ear turned toward the television, his unseeing eyes turned disconcertingly on the narrator. After the news there is a program about cathedral architecture and the narrator tries to explain to Robert what a cathedral looks like. They smoke some marijuana and he blunders on, failing to express the visual effect of a cathedral's soaring space to a man who, as far as the narrator can tell, has no analogues for spatial dimension. When Robert asks what a fresco is, the narrator is at a complete loss. The blind man proposes a solution, and on a heavy paper bag the narrator draws a cathedral while Robert's hand rides his. He begins with a box and pointed roof that could be his own house, and adds spires, buttresses, windows, and doors, and at last he has elaborated a gothic cathedral in lines pressed hard into the paper. When Robert takes his hand and makes him close his eyes to touch the cathedral, he "sees." Even when he is told that he can open his eyes, he chooses not to, for he is learning what he has long been incapable of perceiving and even now can not articulate:

I thought I'd keep them that way a little longer. I thought it was something I ought not to forget.

"Well?" he said. "Are you looking?"

My eyes were still closed. I was in my house and I knew that. But I didn't feel inside anything.

"It's really something," I said.

The cathedral, of course, is the space that does not limit, and his perception of something—objective, substantial, meaningful—that cannot be seen with ordinary sight depends on his having to perceive as another perceives. In fictional terms, he learns to shift point of view. In emotional terms, he learns to feel empathy. In the moment when the blind man and the narrator share an identical perception of spiritual space, the narrator's sense of enclosure—of being confined by his own house and circumstances—vanishes as if by an act of grace, or a very large spiritual reward for a virtually insignificant gesture. Following the metaphor of the story, the narrator learns to see with eyes other than that insufficient set that keeps him a friendless drunk and a meager husband.

In a reminiscence on John Gardner, his late teacher, Carver pauses to reflect that at some point in late youth or early middle age we all face the inevitability of our failure and we suffer "the suspicion that we're taking on water, and that things are not working out in our lives the way we'd planned." For a time there is nothing anyone can do against the debilitating effect of such a recognition. But in "The Calm," "A Small, Good Thing," and "Cathedral," protagonists are taken from behind by understanding. When it occurs, understanding comes as the result of an unearned and unexpected gift, a kind of grace constituted in human contact that a fortunate few experience. Of course, Carver does not imply a visitation of the Holy Ghost, nor does he argue that salvation is apt to fall on the lowliest of creatures in the moment of their greatest need as it does, say, in Flannery O'Connor, whose benighted Ruby Turpin in "Revelation" is saved in spite of herself when shown the equality of all souls in the sight of God. Grace, Carver says, is bestowed upon us by other mortals, and it comes suddenly, arising in circumstances as mundane as a visit to the barber shop, and in the midst of feelings as ignoble or quotidian as jealousy, anger, loneliness, and grief. It can be represented in incidental physical contact, and the deliverer is not necessarily aware of his role. Not Grace in the Christian sense at all, it is what grace becomes in a godless world—a deep and creative connection between humans that reveals to Carver's alienated and diminished creatures that there can be contact in a world they supposed was empty of sense or love. Calm is given in a touch, a small, good thing is the food we get from others, and in the cathedrals we draw together, we create large spaces for the spirit.

Source: Mark A.R. Facknitz, "'The Calm,' 'A Small, Good Thing,' and 'Cathedral': Raymond Carver and the Rediscovery of Human Worth," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 23, No. 3, Summer 1986, pp. 287-296.

Sources

Applefield, David, "Fiction and America: Raymond Carver," in Conversations with Raymond Carver, edited by Marshall Bruce Gentry and William L. Stull, University Press of Mississippi, 1990, p. 207, originally published in Frank: An International Journal of Contemporary Writing & Art, No. 8-9, Winter 1987–1988.

Carver, Raymond, "The Bath," in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Knopf, 1981, pp. 47-56.

――――――, "A Small, Good Thing," in Cathedral, Knopf, 1983, pp. 59-89.

Howe, Irving, "Stories of Our Loneliness," in New York Times Book Review, September 11, 1983, p. 43.

McCaffery, Larry, and Sinda Gregory, "An Interview with Raymond Carver," in Conversations with Raymond Carver, edited by Marshall Bruce Gentry and William L. Stull, University Press of Mississippi, 1990, p. 102, originally published in Alive and Writing: Interviews with American Authors of the 1980s, University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Runyon, Randolph Paul, Reading Raymond Carver, Syracuse University Press, 1992, p. 3.

Saltzman, Arthur M., Understanding Raymond Carver, University of South Carolina Press, 1988, p. 4.

Shute, Kathleen WestFall, "Finding the Words: The Struggle for Salvation in the Fiction of Raymond Carver," in Hollins Critic, Vol. 24, No. 5, December 1987, pp. 1-10.

Stull, William, "Beyond Hopelessville: Another Side of Raymond Carver," in Philological Quarterly, Vol. 64, 1985, p. 11.

――――――, "Matters of Life and Death," in Conversations with Raymond Carver, edited by Marshall Bruce Gentry and William L. Stull, University Press of Mississippi, 1990, p. 185, originally published in The Bloomsbury Review, January/February 1988.

Wickenden, Dorothy. "Old Darkness, New Light, in New Republic, Vol. 189, November 14, 1983, p. 38.

Further Reading

Leypoldt, Gunter, "Raymond Carver's 'Epiphanic Moments,'" in Style, Vol. 35, No. 3, Fall 2001, pp. 531-49.

Leypoldt discusses four different types of epiphanic moments in Carver's fiction: moments of sudden illumination; arrested epiphanies in which characters realize they are on the brink of a discovery but do not grasp what it is; ironized epiphanies in which the reader transcends the character's limited viewpoint; and comic epiphanies that are irrelevant to the overall plot closure.

Meyer, Adam, Raymond Carver, Twayne's United States Authors Series, No. 633, Twayne Publishers, 1995.

Meyer analyzes Carver's life and career and most of his fictional output. He traces the arc of Carver's artistic development, arguing that the term minimalist applies only to a portion of his work. In his analysis of "A Small, Good Thing," Meyer accepts the critical consensus that the work is one of the most effective of all Carver's stories.

Nesset, Kirk, The Stories of Raymond Carver: A Critical Study, Ohio University Press, 1995, pp. 61-66.

Nesset credits "A Small, Good Thing" with presenting a fullness and optimism unequalled in any other story by Carver. The psychological and spiritual expansion is due to the fact that the characters learn how to listen and communicate with one another.

Peden, William, The American Short Story: Continuity and Change, 1940–1975, 2nd edition, revised and enlarged, Houghton Mifflin, 1975.

Peden analyzes the significant trends and movements associated with the American short story in the thirty-five years up to the time immediately preceding the work of Carver. He discusses the work of the most outstanding recent short fiction writers, including John Updike, John Cheever, Donald Bartholme, Bernard Malamud, and Joyce Carol Oates.