28 pages • 56 minutes read
A Small Good Thing
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Literary Devices
Diction
This short story displays Carver’s signature style—direct, simple, and stark prose. Concretely, this means sentences stripped of almost all modifiers. Scotty, for example, is “…immediately knocked down by a car” (377). While the phrase includes an adverb, Carver doesn’t describe the dreadful detail—the murder weapon—beyond its being a car. He doesn’t describe its color, its model, or whether it was speeding. Instead, he lets the noun carry all the impact. Another example is Scotty’s eventual death:
The boy looked at them, but without any sign of recognition. Then his mouth opened, his eyes scrunched closed, and he howled until he had no more air in his lungs. His face seemed to relax and soften then. His lips parted as his last breath was puffed through his throat and exhaled gently through the clenched teeth (396).
This might have justified a different author to wax lyrical or deploy ostentation. Instead, Carver uses a string of simple, mostly active sentences that begin with the grammatical subject. Although he uses a couple adjectives (“closed,” “clenched”), these sentences are nearly all composed of nouns and verbs. The choice of verbs—rather than unnecessary descriptors—communicates the dread of Scotty’s death: “scrunched,” “howled,” and “puffed,” for instance. Even the adjectives are verb forms (in this case, past participles). Carver conveys everything via movement or change rather than lingering or cluttering up the diction with adjectives. Arguably, his story packs a greater emotional punch because of its directness.
Flat Versus Round Characters
This distinction comes from E. M. Forster’s influential craft book Aspects of the Novel (1927). Forster distinguishes between flat characters, who are relatively simple and undergo little change over the course of a story, and round characters, who are more nuanced and undergo significant and satisfying change. As mentioned in the Characters section above, it’s interesting to see which characters undergo change or development in this story and consider what to take from it. Given that Howard and especially Ann are the most significant characters (and the ones whose points of view are most evident), they might normally undergo the most change in the story. While they must handle a devastating blow and a change in their circumstances, whether they significantly change is a worthy question. Conversely, the baker, whose presence seems at first incidental and who might otherwise be a flat character, undergoes the most dramatic change in attitude—from the seemingly surly, abrupt character of the opening pages and the tormenting caller to the Weiss household, to the sympathetic and even supplicant host. On the first reading, this change might feel like a hard sell. The baker appears so little throughout the story that the degree to which he changes feels unearned—so extreme as to be improbable. On a second reading, this inversion of which characters undergo the most change lends credence to an ironic interpretation of the story. All is not as it seems in Carver’s seemingly sentimental tale of a couple confronting loss.
Bathos
Another way that Carver upends a casual reading of the story is through bathos. Bathos is an ancient Greek term that describes an anti-climactic ending. As the Weisses set out for the bakery late at night, Ann is boiling with rage. After the baker’s last call, she says, “‘I’d like to kill him […] I’d like to shoot him and watch him kick’” (400). Returning to the bakery, she even barges in ahead of her husband, dead set on confrontation. The tension builds as the baker picks up a rolling pin and the confusion over the cake pushes both sides to the brink. But rather than descend into violence, a desperate tussle, Carver deflates the scene, like pricking a balloon. When Ann says, “‘My son’s dead’” (403), the tension drains away: “Just as suddenly as it had welled in her, the anger dwindled, gave way to something else, a dizzy feeling of nausea” (403).
This kind of anticlimax might connote realistic self-preservation kicking in on Ann’s part and compassion on the baker’s part. However, it defies the storytelling conventions of action rising toward a climax and draws attention to the ending in an unexpected way. Like other elements, this could contribute to a reading of the story that looks past the literal meaning and contemplates a different intention from the author.
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By Raymond Carver
