Raymond Carver, 'The Father'

Father? Who's a Father?

"The Father" is one of Raymond Carver's short-shorts from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, his first collection of stories. It's a two-pager, and even at that length it is filled with the repetitive dialog frequently seen in Carver's early stories. But notice how, without ever expressing it, Carver makes you think that what's in question is whether the father in the story is the baby's father, even though it's said the baby looks like "Daddy." After saying that, Carver does an interesting thing--he puts the father's identity in question:

"But who does Daddy look like?" Phyllis asked.

"Who does Daddy look like?" Alice repeated, and then they all at once looked through the kitchen where the father was sitting at the table with his back to them.

"Why, nobody!" Phyllis said and began to cry a little.

"Hush," the grandmother said and looked away and then back at the baby.

"Daddy doesn't look like anybody!" Alice said.

"But he has to look like somebody," Phyllis said...

So, in addition to maybe not being the father, the father is a nobody, he isn't anybody, and he is not a somebody. Further, as the story ends, he is "without expression." In these two scant pages Carver has put both the baby's (he might be a bastard child) and the father's (he's nothing of note, and may not even be a father) identity into question. Perhaps more remarkable, from the economy of prose standpoint, is that Carver achieves that feat all in the story's second page. The first page is mostly banal baby observing until the comment is made that the baby looks like