A Summary and Analysis of Raymond Carver’s ‘The Father’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Father’ is one of Raymond Carver’s shortest stories. It is more of a sketch or even, perhaps, a piece of ‘flash fiction’ than a ‘short story’ in the conventional sense; but then one of the things that great writers in the short-story form have always done is make us question the very conventions of the form.

This story concerns a newborn baby. The female relatives of the baby admire him and try to work out who he reminds them of; in the course of the story, they realise that the father of the baby appears to lack any defining identity.

Summary

The newborn baby lies in a basket beside a bed, with his mother, grandmother, and three sisters all in the room with him. The father of the baby, meanwhile, is in the kitchen. The sisters discuss which of them the baby loves, and Phyllis, one of the three sisters, states that the baby loves their father because both he and the baby are ‘boys’.

The grandmother points out how ‘fat’ the baby’s arm is, and suggests the baby’s fingers are like those of the mother. The mother, meanwhile, points out how healthy the baby is. Alice, another of the three sisters, asks who the baby looks like, and the third sister, Carol, simply observes how ‘pretty’ the baby’s eyes are.

The grandmother notes a resemblance between the baby’s lips and those of the baby’s grandfather – the grandmother’s (presumably dead) husband. The mother isn’t sure there’s a resemblance, however. Alice thinks the baby’s nose reminds her of someone’s, but she fails to identify whose.

Phyllis interjects that the baby doesn’t resemble any of them, in fact. But Carol then has a little brainwave, and decides the baby resembles their father. But that leads Phyllis to wonder: who does ‘Daddy’ resemble? Alice repeats her question, and Phyllis begins to cry when she realises their father doesn’t look like anyone either.

She cannot handle this revelation. Surely, she insists, their father has to look like somebody else? The mother and her three daughters all look at the father sitting at the kitchen table in the other room. He has turned to look at them, his face white and expressionless.

Analysis

What should we make of this little tale of family resemblance (or non-resemblance)? Perhaps rather than searching for some key to understanding the story’s meaning, a better approach – at least to begin the process of understanding Carver’s gnomic little text – is to outline some of the key themes or preoccupations of this family tableau.

‘Identity’ seems like a strong place to start. As a newborn baby, the centre of the story is something of a tabula rasa or blank slate. His identity can only be ascertained or ascribed through a process of comparison to the other family members: to the grandfather (himself absent, and so completely unknowable), to the mother, and to the father.

But even the comparison to the father isn’t enough to fix the baby’s identity, at least as far as the sisters are concerned. For that then leads them to wonder who their father resembles: in order to delineate his identity or sense of being, he too must be linked or related to another member of the family in order to have a ‘self’ of his own.

This is the paradox of Carver’s story: that one’s individual sense of self can only be isolated by identifying what that person shares with someone else.

Identity

It is worth noting that, although the baby is the core of the story in that he is the main focus of the five female family members, the story itself identifies the father as the locus of the story’s meaning. It is called, after all, ‘The Father’ rather than ‘The Baby’. As in other Carver stories, such as ‘Popular Mechanics’, a number of the characters (the mother, father, and baby) are unnamed, suggesting they are archetypes meant to represent an everyman and everywoman (and everybaby).

The story appears to play on the notion that newborn babies are often likened to their parents: cooing admirers might observe, for instance, that a couple’s recently arrived offspring ‘has his father’s eyes’ or ‘her mother’s mouth’ and so on. But once we have identified these supposed shared genetic characteristics, where does that leave us? Should we trace them back further, trying to note where the father got his features from?

The children draw a blank here. It’s unclear whether the grandmother in the story is the baby’s maternal or paternal grandmother: is she the mother to the mother in the story, or the mother of the father who sits in the kitchen? If she is the mother’s mother, then the father’s parents – the baby’s paternal grandparents – are entirely absent from the story. The father is a dead-end, in lineage terms: his daughters cannot identify where he got his looks from in the first place.

Space

The locations or spaces inhabited by the characters in ‘The Father’ are also laden with significance. Raymond Carver’s fiction is shot through with the importance of rooms: in ‘Popular Mechanics’, another of his very short stories and one that is even more widely studied than ‘The Father’, the wife remains on the threshold of whatever room (the bedroom, the living room) her estranged husband occupies during their argument.

In the present story, of course, this separation between the male character – the husband and father – and his female relatives (and the newborn male son over whom they are busy fussing) is marked by the division or demarcation between the bedroom and the kitchen. Curiously, it is the father who occupies the traditionally domestic space or locus of the domestic sphere (although he is seated at the kitchen table rather than busy cooking or cleaning).

The final moment of the story, in which the father turns towards his relations with a ‘white’ face devoid of expression, ends this little tableau on an ambiguous note. Is ‘white’ a simple description of his Caucasian features, or has his face been drained of colour because he, like his daughters, has realised his identity is hollow or non-existent?

Final thoughts

Perhaps this, too, is a trap laid for us by Carver. In many of Carver’s stories, his narrators hint at the possibility of some sort of ‘epiphany’ having taken place in the minds of the characters, but the very existence of such a realisation is called into question by the ambiguous manner in which it is described.

So we may conclude that the father has turned towards his family with a white face because he has overheard their conversation about him and realised something which he is now forced to confront. Alternatively, he may have merely heard their voices and turned to see what they are talking about. His face is, after all, expressionless: as neutral a word as one can get to describe a character’s features.

If modernist short stories were often marked by epiphanies whose lasting significance was subtly called into doubt by the narrator of the story, Carver’s minimalist fictions often move even further away from any definitive insight or revelation. Just as the father’s origins or ancestry remain a blank to his children, so he, as a character, remains an enigma to us, the readers of ‘The Father’.