A Small, Good Thing by Raymond Carver: Anns Reconciliation with Presence of Death - Essay Example

Ann’s Reconciliation with the Inevitable Presence of Death: An Immature Believer’s Attainment of Maturity Though on the surface level Raymond Carver’s “A Small, Good Thing” tells the story of compassion and reconciliation among the central characters and generally among people, an in-depth analysis will necessarily reveal that it is the story about an individual’s reconciliation with his or her existential angst and reality of death and adversaries of life. Unlike Brian Aubrey’s claim that this story of Carver is totally the nullification god, religion, faith, etc, the story does not tell anything particularly about religion and god. In this regard, Brian says, “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” (2). Ann’s innocent son meets an accident and dies after three days; her prayer goes unheard. Obviously Carver’s portrayal of such a world does not necessarily mean that there is no god or that religion is as futile as Ann’s unheard prayer. Rather the story can be viewed as an immature believer’s achievement of maturity that belief in life as well as death is a part of one’s faith. Carver’s use of religious symbolisms such as Ann’s thirty three age, Scotty’s death on the third day, etc rather refers to this greater truth and praying and believing do not necessarily mean that they will heard by each time. The story depicts a bleak and gloomy world where prayers are unheard; where the Heavenly father does not save a dying boy; where life is affected with diseases, death and other cruelty of fates. In the beginning of the story, Ann is supposedly a stranger before her son Scotty’s death. She possesses a good husband, a lovely child and a happy family. In this bleak world, she cannot build a bond with what is lowly, coarse and dark, because she is far away from these adversaries and darks of life. Also she cannot even think of bonding a relationship with those who are affected with them. The baker was “abrupt with her-not rude, just abrupt. She gave up trying to make friends with him.” (Carver 2) This is where Ann’s shrinkage from the adversaries of life begins. She starts to shrink from the presence of the person like the baker; then she experiences death’s inevitable encroachment of death towards her son Scotty and endeavors to refuse the presence of death in life. But gradually she succumbs to the knowledge that death is a reality in her life as it is in others’ lives. Thus her reconciliation with the gloomy presence death begins with her effort to communicate with the Negro family in the hospital and finally it reaches its full phase through granting the baker’s offer to eat something at the end of the story. Ann cannot successfully communicate with the baker, who has no children and who is old enough to experience these adversaries of the world, as the narrator of Carver’s story says, “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” (Carver 2). The baker appears to be less responsive to Ann’s fancy of styling the cake in a starship pattern. This irresponsiveness is rather the baker’s calmness and composed attitude to his customers’ convulsive instruction for decorating their children’s cake and celebrating their birthday party. Indeed this distance between Ann and the baker evolves from the difference between their experiences about life. But this distance is much narrowed by her experience about her son’s accident and subsequent death. Her horror about the presence of encroaching death is multiplied by Dr. Francis’s sincere optimism. Depending on Dr. Francis’s continual assurance she tries to retreat from the reality of death. But when Scotty died failing her prayer and the doctor’s optimism, Ann learns to accept the presence of death with horror gone. Meanwhile she learns to live her life in a new way. Indeed this distance between Ann and other people also create a communication gap. She feels alienated from others who suffer. Also she feels that the fact that she is the victim of the adversaries of life can serve as an excuse to create a bond with those people. That’s why; she endeavors to explain her situation to the Negro family in the middle of the story and to the baker at the end. In both cases the mode of self-explanations are almost the same. To the Negro she explains, “My son was hit by a car....He has a concussion and a little skull fracture, but he’s going to be all right. He’s in shock now, but it might be some kind of coma, too. That’s what really worries us, the coma part.” (Carver 3) Unlike the repulsion she has felt about the baker at the beginning of the story, she feels like building a relationship with the people in the misery that has been inflicted upon him. Ann is inclined to “talk more with these people who were in the same kind of waiting she was in. She was afraid, and they were afraid. They had that in common” (Carver 1). Again like the baker’s careful, a bit commercial, manifestation of disinterestedness, the Negroes in the hospital also seem to be disinterested. The Negro woman let “her head fall on her shoulder and looked away from Ann, no longer interested” (Carver 2). Ann’s continual shrinkage from the reality of death and darks of life is vividly evident in her refusal to eat anything. Both Ann’s husband and Dr. Francis advise her to eat something. For an instance, Dr. Francis says, “I know this is hard. Feel free to go out for a bite…It would do you good. I’ll put a nurse in here while you’re gone if you’ll feel better about going. Go and have yourselves something to eat” (Carver 3). But each time, they offer her to eat something, she denies: “I couldn’t eat anything” (Carver 2). Again when her husband proposes her to have breakfast, she says, “Breakfast, I don’t want any breakfast” (Carver 2). Indeed such refusals reveal her horror at the encroaching death to her son. Also Ann’s refusal to eat something symbolically means that she refuses life because of the terror induced by death’s inevitable presence in life. Therefore small but god thing like eating is necessary for Ann in order to reconcile again with life as Gadi Taub says, “It is food that they need now…they need to be reattached not to the grand meaning of life, but to its fabric, its texture, its habit.” (2) But when she begins to learn about death and to acknowledge its inevitability in life, she attains the ultimate reconciliation. In other words, by learning to acknowledge the inevitability of death she rather conquers it and learns to live. Works Cited Aubrey, Brian. “Critical Essay on A Small, Good Thing”, Short Story Criticism. Detroit: Gale Publication. Vol. 23 (2006), p.102-119 Carver, Raymond. “A Small, Good Thing”, Feb 25, 2010. Available at Taub, Gadi. “On Small, Good Thing: Raymond Carver’s Modest Existentialism”, Short Story Criticism. Detroit: Gale Publication. Vol. 104 (2002), p.102-119 Read More