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

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Fancy a very short story about voyeurism, exhibitionism, and titillation? Raymond Carver’s story ‘The Idea’ has all three, and in his trademark minimalist style and utilising first-person narration, he presents us with a short tale told by a suburban housewife who takes an unhealthy interest in her neighbours’ nighttime activities.

Summary

The story is narrated by a woman who watches their neighbour, a man who engages in unconventional nighttime behaviour. She has been observing him for three months. The neighbour turns off the lights in his house, strips naked, and then walks around outside with a flashlight. He then peers in through his own bedroom window and watches a woman in there (presumably his wife) undressing. Then he walks back to the screen door of his house and goes back inside.

The narrator encourages her husband, Vern, to join her in watching the neighbour. They’re both fascinated and disturbed by the neighbour’s actions, with the wife being especially intrigued by him (the husband seems a little embarrassed, and worried that the neighbour will see his wife watching him).

The narrator tells Vern that she is going to tell this other woman what she thinks of her. She’s going to tell her that she thinks she’s ‘trash’, presumably because she dislikes the fact that the woman is an exhibitionist who likes to be watched as she undresses for her husband.

Vern smokes many cigarettes and then goes and freshens up in the bathroom, having decided there’s nothing worth watching on the television. He returns to the kitchen smelling of aftershave and they sit and eat cornflakes and freshly baked apple pie together. Vern then goes to bed while his wife sprays an insecticide in the trash can and under the sink to kill the ants that have appeared in the kitchen.

The narrator wants to wake Vern and tell him about the ants, but decides to let him sleep. She imagines the ants spreading all over the house so goes and sprays again even though the ants have all disappeared from under the kitchen sink. Her last thought in the story is of the female neighbour – whom she again describes as trash – and ‘The idea!’ that she could do such a thing with the male neighbour.

Analysis

One of the key themes of ‘The Idea’ is voyeurism, but it is a layered kind of voyeurism. The couple watches their neighbour, but he himself appears to be engaged in voyeuristic activity with the female guest in his bedroom. We might surmise that he gets his kicks from peering in on a woman undressing, while he is outside in all weathers and the woman is indoors in the supposed privacy of the bedroom. He likes the idea of being a peeping tom, and presumably the woman, too, enjoys being an exhibitionist, since she is willingly performing this little peep show for him.

The narrator morally judges the neighbour’s wife for undressing for her husband’s enjoyment. But Carver invites us to question how moral the narrator’s actions are. By voyeuristically watching her male neighbour as he watches his wife undress, she, too, is participating in their act of voyeurism and exhibitionism, for she is witnessing the wife undressing, too. But whereas the wife has presumably consented to let her husband watch her naked through their bedroom window, she has not invited the narrator and her husband to watch her too. So who is really the ‘trash’ in this story?

There are little signs that the narrator morally disapproves of her neighbours’ behaviour because witnessing their little act of voyeurism/exhibitionism rouses a jealous streak in her. Her question to Vern – ‘What does she have that other women don’t have?’ – tacitly invites us to imbue that ‘other women’ with personal meaning: she might as well be asking, ‘What does she have that I don’t have?’

She is, then, simultaneously appalled and fascinated by her neighbours’ shenanigans. Does this make her a hypocrite? It would be easy to condemn her morally and answer ‘yes’ (and through so doing, to risk increasing the layered act of voyeurism and moral judgment that the story sets up, as we readers observe and judge the narrator as she observes and judges her neighbours). Except it’s possible to be both fascinated by something and to find it morally objectionable. We might find something titillating because it arouses a base instinct in us while nevertheless hold firm to the belief that such titillation should be avoided precisely because it has the power to reduce us to our base instincts.

At the same time, the two neighbours are engaging in nothing more than harmless fun in their own home (and yard), and for all we know they may be far happier than the narrator and Vern, whose marriage seems marked by silence, disconnection, and a general lack of fulfilment, where eating cornflakes with brown sugar late at night is as racy as things get. They have turned to ogling their neighbours as spectacle because there is nothing on the TV (except talk shows, which the narrator doesn’t like), so they are to an extent reliant on their neighbours’ antics to provide a little bit of entertainment and excitement of a night.

The husband’s compulsive smoking habit may be interpreted as displacement from the lack of sexual fulfilment in their marriage, while the narrator’s turning on of the light after the neighbours’ ‘show’ has finished for the night may indicate a greater desire to be ‘turned on’ in other respects. The fact that, in response to her turning on the light, he ‘lights’ up another cigarette rather than making a romantic overture tells us everything in just a couple of small details.

Symbolism

The symbolism of the ants is also worth noting. The neighbour notices these in the kitchen and sprays the area to kill the ants off. This appears to work, but she is plagued by the fantasy (or is it actually a dream?) that the whole house is overrun by them. This infestation – which, along with that domestic centrepiece of the kitchen sink, is centred upon the ‘garbage can’ – clearly symbolises that the narrator’s house is the true home of ‘trash’, for all that she might feel her female neighbour is ‘trash’ for enjoying stripping off for her husband’s pleasure.

What’s more, the fact that the narrator continues to see ants in the kitchen even after she has sprayed and killed them all suggests that she is half-aware of what he ants represent: a certain moral ‘dirtiness’ to her own marriage which has long ago suppressed any genuine romantic or sexual feeling, instead judging others for their erotic exploits while secretly (perhaps even to themselves) becoming aroused by those exploits.