This paper presents two interrelated essays on Steven Barthelme's short story "Claire." The first examines the stray cat as a central symbol representing the protagonist Bailey's inner condition — his neediness, latent likeability, and capacity for change. The second essay traces Bailey's moral arc from a self-destructive gambling addict who exploits his former lover Claire to a man capable of generosity and genuine love. Together, the essays argue that Bailey's decision to care for the hungry cat marks the pivotal shift in his consciousness, after which his life begins to recover the meaning and connection he has squandered.
"Claire" by Steven Barthelme is a story about a man who has lost the love of his life, Claire, mainly because of an addiction to gambling. Although the couple has parted and Claire intends to marry someone else, they still love each other and have remained friends. Bailey often borrows money from her to support his habit, and the reader gets the feeling early in the story that Bailey is going from bad to worse, becoming increasingly seedy. The cat appears like a signal that something is about to change. The cat represents Bailey himself and the condition of his consciousness. This can be seen in the cat's neediness, its opportunism or good luck, and its basic likeableness.
That the cat is needy, just as Bailey is needy, is clear at the moment it enters the story: "The cat watched him. Bailey reached carefully in over its head and took hold of the scruff of the neck and lifted the cat out of the seat. 'Jesus,' he said. 'You're just bones. You haven't eaten in a month'" (p. 326). Bailey's own hunger is not physical but spiritual and emotional. He feels that his life is meaningless now that he and Claire are no longer together. As he explains to her after meeting the new man in her life:
"All that time when we were together, when I was a lowlife, a slacker, every goddamn day, it was electric. Something wonderful was coming. I remember how wonderful stuff at the grocery store was, those Rubbermaid things and the little hardware display and funny vegetables. Then I got a job and a nice fat salary." He turned his palms up and gave her a puzzled look. "All gone," he said (p. 339).
The cat, hungry for food to nourish its body, is a symbol of Bailey's hunger for real love and for meaning — Claire's love — to nourish his soul and make his life meaningful again. Inside, he is just like the cat: all bony and scruffy. As students of literary symbolism will recognize, this kind of mirroring between character and object is a classic device for externalizing a protagonist's interior state.
The cat also represents good fortune arriving unexpectedly — luck coming in the door, or in Bailey's case, the car. It appears out of nowhere in his car and refuses to leave him. When Bailey decides to accept the cat and help it survive, this marks a change in his consciousness. This is the first moment when he becomes a sympathetic character to the reader. In a sense, the cat is his redemption. Prior to his encounter with the cat, we experience him as a "user" — someone who borrows money, has no pride, and doesn't seem to have much conscience. But when he keeps the cat, we sense that something good is about to happen to him. And, of course, it does. That night he wins sixteen thousand dollars at the casino. Yet he realizes that the money itself doesn't make him happy:
"It came to him that Claire wouldn't care about it, not at all. She'd be happy to take her loan money back, but that's all. He hadn't done anything at all, the way she saw it. Just didn't matter to her. He ran through some channels on the TV, settled on some talk show, set the control down. He touched his pocket, looked toward the kitchen. 'God-damn it,' he said, 'get in here, you pest'" (p. 333).
It is significant that he calls the cat to him at the very moment he realizes that gambling does not make him feel happy or satisfied. The cat has found a relationship — with him — that is satisfying, and it knows enough not to let go of it. In the same way, Bailey begins to recognize the value of his relationship with Claire.
Despite being down-and-out, hungry, and stray, the cat is rather a likeable animal. So, too, is Bailey a likeable person at heart. As the story unfolds and he begins to understand himself better, the reader understands him too and likes him better. Like Bailey, the cat at first seems unappealing: "'Your cat?' Bailey said. 'I like dogs,' the old man said. 'That looks sick.' Bailey crouched down and opened his hand. The cat jerked forward and cleaned all three Cheetos in one bite. 'Hey,' Bailey said, and pulled his hand back as the cat tried to lick orange dust from his palm'" (p. 326). In one brief exchange the cat goes from looking "sick" to being a friendly animal that licks the palm of its benefactor. Likewise, Bailey moves from seedy low-life to a generous and decent human being willing to help a miserable creature.
What happens to the cat reflects what happens to Bailey. When a dog tries to attack it, the cat decides to fight back: "The dog jumped back, yelling a weird, twisting cry that began in a growl and then raced into something higher pitched and plaintive. It backed away from the side of the car, looking confused, blood all over its face" (p. 327). Likewise, Bailey decides to fight for Claire. He points out the negative traits in her intended husband. He asks her to marry him. He tells her he would like to have children with her.
The symbolism of the cat is integral to the story because the cat's condition mirrors the main character's condition. The cat is a symbol of Bailey's inner self. Because Bailey intends to keep the cat and care for it, we are left with the feeling that his life will improve as well. As the cat's situation gets better, so will Bailey's. As Bailey says to Claire near the end of the story, "Anyway, this cat is skinny…looks like he hasn't eaten since the Bicentennial. You'll come to see him sometime." He glanced vaguely out into the damp morning air, closed his eyes, and shuddered again. "Still like cats, don't you?" (p. 339). The cat is a symbol of something inside Bailey that Claire can still love. This kind of animal symbolism — using a creature's condition to reflect a character's spiritual state — runs throughout literary tradition, and Barthelme deploys it with quiet economy.
"Claire" is also a story about a man who has no life. Bailey seems to have lost everything: Claire, the love of his life, and all the joy he once felt for living. Because of his gambling addiction, he is broke, deeply in debt, and apparently alone in the world. Until nearly the end, it is not even clear if he has a job. Bailey needs a life, and the message of the story is that it is possible to get your life back after you have lost it. This can be seen in Bailey's gradual rise from rock-bottom to something genuinely hopeful. When Bailey changes from a taker to a giver, his luck changes too, and he starts to reclaim what he has thrown away.
At the beginning of the story, Bailey is more or less a scrummy low-life. He goes to his ex-girlfriend Claire for money to play blackjack at the casino and tries to manipulate her into giving him a loan of a thousand dollars. He advises her not to lend it to him if she doesn't want to, but he doesn't really mean it: "He always tried to give some advice while he was sponging, to maintain the advantage he had once had over her" (p. 324). He isn't thinking about loving her — he is thinking only of what he can get from her. At the beginning of the story, Bailey is the very image of a "taker." Yet when Claire reaches for her pen to write him a check, he suddenly remembers one of the things he loved about her:
[She] took a pen from a can of pens on the bright windowsill. The can had once held some kind of fancy fruit from Poland or someplace and the label was striking — green, blue, black. Claire had always found things like that, nice things that Bailey overlooked, didn't notice, couldn't see, on his way to some obvious choice, something he had read about in a magazine. Her unerring eye, the ease of it, had always been mysterious to him (pp. 324–25).
This moment is when the reader first begins to realize that Bailey still loves Claire: "Claire was more beautiful now than she had been in college and in college she had always drawn a crowd. Stop a clock, Bailey thought" (p. 325). But when Claire invites him to dinner the next night to meet her fiancé, he forgets all about it. Gambling — getting something for nothing — is more important to him than his relationship with her.
Bailey got addicted to gambling after taking a job in a department store that didn't really suit him. The job paid well and he received early promotions, but it was boring. He took up gambling for the excitement: "Then he'd started gambling, which was more interesting. It was a department store, who could stay interested in that? It was dull…" (p. 329). The store sent him to a sales conference he didn't want to attend, so he went to a casino instead. He won $800 — not a repeatable success — and got hooked. His gambling addiction apparently led him toward the wrong kind of life. He was taken in by the excitement and the glamour, and began to believe in the illusion that you can get something for nothing — that all you need is luck, not hard work or sacrifice. Then he started "fooling around" with a girl named Dashy. The name implies that Bailey is on a self-destructive path: he has dashed all his hopes and dreams and a life with Claire for a shallow existence that will never be meaningful or fulfilling. It led him to always search for what he can get rather than what he can give. His infidelity is what ultimately causes Claire to leave him.
"Caring for cat sparks Bailey's moral and emotional recovery"
When Bailey wins sixteen thousand dollars, it does not really give him joy because he has no one to share his good fortune with: "It was like being a kid and doing something really spectacular about which no one cared, like getting all the way home through the woods without ever touching the ground, or hitting a home run in an empty ballpark, when it didn't count" (p. 333). At this point he decides to go see Claire, share his good fortune, and repay the money he owes her. Underneath, he has begun to hope again: "Maybe they could try again, him and Claire" (p. 333).
This shift from taking to giving is the moral heart of the story. The theme of redemption through small, selfless acts — caring for a stray cat, choosing to return money rather than spend it — gives the narrative its emotional credibility. Bailey doesn't change through a dramatic epiphany; he changes incrementally, act by act.
When he does see Claire, Bailey asks her to marry him and tells her he will give her the children she wants. He has come back from being a taker and started once again to be a giver. He shows her that the man she has decided to marry is not right for her — that man owns a gun and threatened to shoot Bailey's cat, and Claire loves cats. How could she be happy with someone who would kill one? Bailey confides in Claire all the thoughts he has been having about his life. We do not know for certain that Claire will take him back, but it is pretty clear that she still loves him. He tells her about his cat — the cat he wants to share with her — along with his good luck, his change of heart, and his love for her. Giving is better than taking, especially when Claire is about to kiss him. He doesn't take a kiss, though — he waits for Claire to give it. "'Still like cats, don't you?' he said, waiting, urgently, for her kiss" (p. 339).
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