Small Good Thing by Raymond Carver

¶ … realistic? Since a short story is a work of fiction, a product of the imagination, how does an author create the illusion that what is transpiring in the narrative seems 'realistic' to the reader? Why do some works of fiction seem more realistic than other works of fiction? The short story "A Small Good Thing" by Raymond Carver seems like a realistic work of fiction and thus is an excellent way to answer these questions.

Carver's story tells the tale of a young boy who is hit by a car near the day of his birthday. It relates the effects this tragedy has upon the boy's parents. Through the use of extremely mundane but specific details, simple and action-oriented characterization of the major protagonists, and very simple and spare prose, Carver creates a sense of a realistic story, even though the end of the tale has a slightly surrealistic quality to it.

The use of mundane details in the story is what gives the tale is sense of realism. The story begins with the boy's mother ordering a cake for her child. The author does not simply say, however, that the cake was ordered. Instead, he details the ordering with the care that a mother would probably very well give to her child's birthday cake. This tells us something about the love the mother feels for the boy as well as the boy himself.

"After looking through a loose-lead binder with photographs of cakes taped onto the pages, she ordered chocolate, the child's favorite. The cake she chose was decorated with a spaceship and a launchign pad under a sprinkling of white stars, and a planet made of red frosting at the other end." This child seems real to the reader, because he is not just a child who is nameless and faceless. We learn he loves rocketships, and that his name is Scotty.

Even the fact that 'Scotty' will appear in green letters on the cake gives a sense of reality rather than simply hearing a narrator relate that the boy's name was Scotty. This focus on the mundane details of life that go on even in the face of tragedy is evident even at the end of the story, after the boy has died. "Over his sobs, she could hear the coffee-maker hissing in the kitchen." The world outside and life does not stop even in the face of great loss.

The mother has lost her child, but this does not mean that the coffee maker has ceased to hiss, in Carver's world. The choice of a coffee-maker rather than a natural sound that has a cliched and dramatic quality of tragedy (like falling rain), that continues even after a young human life is gone makes the story.