28 pages • 56 minutes read
A Small Good Thing
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Themes
Gender Roles and Paternalism
The story’s main character—and its only woman—is Ann Howard. Ann is 33 years old and is apparently a homemaker; when Scotty has his accident on a Monday, she’s waiting at home for him while Howard works. A caring mother, Ann plans a party for her son and orders him a cake. Beyond that, though, Carter reveals little about what animates her. Her only hopes and dreams seem to be in the domestic realm, as a good mother to Scotty and a husband to Howard.
Carver depicts her interactions with the men in the story as being wrought with male condescension toward her. Among several examples of this pervasive paternalism, a remark from Dr. Francis’ to her is perhaps the most flagrant: “Try not to worry, little mother” (383). Other passages show that Ann has internalized this paternalism, as when she chides herself after asking Howard to pray for Scotty. When he reveals that he already has, Ann thinks: “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” (384). Ann’s conception of grief for her stricken son must incorporate Howard; otherwise she perceives herself as failing him somehow. For good measure, she reminds herself that she’s lucky to have him.
It’s unclear to what extent Carver intended to portray—through astute realism—the state of gender roles in the early 1980s (versus incidentally revealing his bias). Unlike Ann, Howard doesn’t ever explicitly think that he’s lucky to have her, even though he seeks her comfort on occasion—and the story never suggests marital problems between them. Even though the third-person omniscient narration gives Carver equal access to Howard’s thoughts, Howard doesn’t remind himself of his gratitude to his wife. Still, other moments point more intentionally to the world the Weisses inhabit—one in which men offer each other warm salutations and ignore women: “Dr. Francis came in and shook hands with Howard, though they’d just seen each other a few hours before” (382). In contrast, Ann’s role (by social attitudes—and by her own) feels restricted. Therefore, her explosive emotional state at the end of the story seems more plausible (as she lives for her family) and more powerful (as expletives from the cosseted Ann reveal the scale of her grief).
The Portrayal of Race in Fiction
Carver’s treatment of race in the story is equally fascinating. He doesn’t specify his main characters’ race—and is by no means the only writer to do this, even today. However, his text contributes to the centering of whiteness in the American canon by virtue of this omission. The story explicitly mentions the ethnicities of secondary characters, which indicates an assumption that omitting ethnicity would imply that a character is white. The portrayal of racial identity in fiction—even beyond just this story—is worth considering, even if Carver approaches race in the story with an eye for complexity. The first explicitly non-white characters Carver presents are the two orderlies who ferry Scotty to another department for tests:
They were black-haired, dark-complexioned men in white uniforms, and they said a few words to each other in a foreign tongue as they unhooked the boy from the tube and moved him from his bed to the gurney […] Once, one of the men made a comment to the other in their own language, and the other man nodded in response (385).
The men communicate something to each other, perhaps about Scotty’s condition, that his parents can’t understand. One interpretation is that this moment reduces the orderlies to a stereotype of non-white men as threatening; not understanding what’s happening at the hospital contributes to the Weisses’ fears. However, two white orderlies exchanging remarks in dense medical jargon, for example, might have conveyed an opacity equally worrying to the Weisses. The point of view is instructive here. Immediately preceding the orderlies’ private remarks is this passage: “Ann gazed at the child. She closed her eyes as the elevator began its descent” (385). The point of view, then, is close to Ann’s, but Carver’s otherwise largely external third-person perspective throughout the story leaves room for interpretation.
More revealing of Ann’s attitude is the use of the word “Negro” (389) when she later tries to leave the hospital and encounters a Black family awaiting news of their son, Franklin: “At the end of the corridor, she turned to her right and entered a little waiting room where a Negro family sat in wicker chairs” (389). Here, the narration is more firmly behind Ann’s eyes, and thus the choice of the term “Negro” (389) characterizes her. By the early 1980s, this term was on the wane. Writing for Slate in 2010, Brian Palmer notes that the term was on its way out by the late 1960s and “totally uncouth by the mid-1980s” (Palmer, Brian. “When Did the Word Negro Become Taboo?” Slate, 11 January 2010). Carver’s use of the term in this 1983 story has several possible explanations. First, Carver may have drafted the story far before its publication, when the term, though increasingly shunned, wasn’t uncommon. Second, he could be implying a period setting. Third, he could be characterizing Ann in some way. Fourth, its use might simply be unintentional and say more about Carver than about Ann.
The first two scenarios are easy to refute because Dr. Francis orders not only X-rays of Scotty but also a “scan,” implying that the story was both written and set when brain imaging was available. While it’s hard to rule out Carver using the term unintentionally, the point of view at least signals the word as part of Ann’s vocabulary too. Arguably, then, her attitudes toward race might be unreconstructed, by the standards of the story’s publication period, and instruct how she interacts with the family and how their predicament haunts her.
The family’s mother may even discern Ann’s prejudices: She “looked away from Ann, no longer interested” (390) before muttering something Ann couldn’t hear. This might indicate that the woman finds something patronizing in how Ann compares the family’s trauma to her own—the first such trauma to afflict the Weisses, who no doubt receive more sympathetic treatment from medical professionals like Dr. Francis. Carver signals the importance of this subtle moment when images of the family return to Ann. Distressed after a phone call from the baker, Ann wants to tell the family’s teenage daughter, “Don’t have children […] For God’s sake, don’t” (393), perhaps appealing across the cosmos to her as a woman, even if their age, race, and class divisions are difficult to bridge. Ann bears some divisive characteristics, but Carver gives her complexity: She has good faith and compassion, even if she’s operating within societal constraints that limit her experience with or understanding of race.
Attitudes Toward Different Social Classes
Carver’s portrayal of Ann points toward another thematic fault line in the story: social class. Ann deals with the Black family at the intersection of their racial and class differences (the way they assume she works at the hospital, for example, or the way she notices that they’ve been eating fast food). However, a strong class difference also exists between the Weisses and the baker. Although this might be obvious from the way Ann expects him to be accommodating, even amusing, when she orders the cake, Carver conveys it more clearly when the baker explains his life to the angry Weisses:
‘I’m just a baker. I don’t claim to be anything else. Maybe once, maybe years ago, I was a different kind of human being. I’ve forgotten. I don’t know for sure. But I’m not any longer, if I ever was. Now I’m just a baker’ (404).
His 16-hour shifts have dehumanized him and reduced his diction to even shorter sentences than Carver uses elsewhere. Business school and a junior partnership at an investment firm aren’t for him. Neither are a leisurely life organizing kids’ parties. Instead, he must work through the night, every night, to make ends meet. As ordinary as the Weisses’ lives may seem, Carver implies more about them by contrasting their lives to those of both the Black family and this browbeaten member of the working class.
As the story ends, the repentant baker scurries to seat Ann and Howard and to offer them solace via warm food and drink. This initially depicts the baker (and the working class he represents) in a positive light. He de-escalates a potentially violent confrontation—and not only sacrifices the payment he rightly earned for his labor but also offers more of his wares to the Weisses free of charge. This could be a parable about working-class virtue, offering reassurance to scared middle-class workers. It could also be something quite different, like a lampooning of middle-class expectations or an ironic take on social status. Given how out of her depth Ann is in relating to the Black family, the baker’s reaction seems a further ironic take on her and Howard’s bourgeois lifestyle. This explains the anticlimactic ending, the peaceful resolution despite all signs pointing to escalation, which draws attention to the baker’s becoming almost subservient to the couple. He dehumanizes himself in their eyes, gushing about his hopeless predicament—and, ironically, this helps soothe the distressed Weisses, who are confronting tragedy for the first time in their lives. Such is their appreciation of his humility that “they did not think of leaving” (405). A sense of their own superiority, even in the wake of their son’s death, comforts them. They lap it up.
In this reading, the whole story takes on a different complexion: a ridiculing of the Weisses for their attitude toward different social classes, of which the baker is emblematic. The story opens with Ann’s snootiness to him as she orders Scotty’s cake. At no point do the Weisses recognize that whatever their tragedy, they should pay the baker what they agreed for the cake. Given this, Scotty’s death might serve as a warning that despite social or racial privileges, like access to better healthcare, tragedy befalls all equally. Carver might even be saying that those who scorn someone who is different on some level deserve a dose of this reality. The mere possibility of such a reading (punctuated by the spareness of Carver’s text, the room it leaves for interpretation) makes “A Small, Good Thing” a far more subversive and interesting story than it might first appear.
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By Raymond Carver
