Raymond Carver

Little Things

To be blunt, I hated this story. While reading the first paragraph, I was able to foreshadow that the story wasn't going to be a happy one because of the way Raymond Carver describes the unpleasant change in weather. When he uses parallelism to compare the darkness that is setting both outside and inside of the house you sense something intense/dramatic is going to occur. 

I was fine with the story until the baby was mentioned. There was a couple arguing and being hopeful, I figured that maybe at the end things will be solved. But when Carver mentions the baby, there's an entirely different twist to the story and you don't know where it's going to go. I didn't like the story because of how the baby was being treated with lack of care by the parents because of their argument. No matter how mad they were at one another, I feel there was a better and mature way to handle the matter. Carver uses ambiguity at the end to let us think of what happened to the child. Although it's not said, you get the assumption that the baby was injured and this gave me a feeling of disgust. Carver definitely knows how to impact his audience emotionally.