Raymond Carver and his use of themes that relate to the Human Condition

Introduction

Raymond Carver certainly had his faults, but he also had much strength that were responsible for making him better loved than most other writers of his generation and ultimately more famous. He was humble, modest, honest, sincere, and dedicated. He was not ashamed to acknowledge his lower-class background or the fact that he had done a considerable amount of work that required him to get his hands dirty. He did not pretend to know all the answers or even to know any of the answers. The reader senses that Carver was someone like himself or herself, struggling to make sense out of a life that actually did not make much sense at all (Runyon pp.13-20).

Discussion

“The Bath,” which originally appeared in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, reappeared in the Cathedral collection, revised and renamed “A Small, Good Thing.” The second version is also reprinted in Carver's final collection, Where I'm Calling From. Both versions of the story focus on a couple whose son is hit by a car on his eighth birthday and who is hospitalized and in a coma. This horrifying event is made more upsetting by the fact that the couple receives annoying anonymous telephone calls from a baker from whom the wife had earlier ordered a custom-made birthday cake for the child. “The Bath” is a brief story, told in Carver's early, neutralized style, focusing less on the feelings of the couple than on the mysterious and perverse interruption of the persistent anonymous calls. So it can be seen that all human conditions like depression and desperation have been used in this short story (Stull pp.63-70).

The revision, “A Small, Good Thing,” is five times longer than “The Bath.” It develops the emotional life of the couple in more sympathetic detail, suggesting that their prayers for their son bind them together in a genuine human communion that they have never felt before. The parents are given more of a sense of everyday human reality in the revision, and their situation is made more conventionally realistic. The father feels that his life has gone smoothly until this point, and the story thus suggests that neither he nor his wife have ever had their comfortable, middle-class lives threatened by such a terrifying disruption before. Much of the detail of the revision follows the parents ...