A Small, Good Thing: Catharsis and Spiritual Renewal - Essay Example

A Small, Good Thing: Catharsis and Spiritual Renewal. In Raymond Carver’s A Small, Good Thing, each of the major characters is confined to a narrow world of his or her own, lacking perception of anybody else’s views or emotions. Scotty’s accident breaks down the confining walls, leading first to incomprehension and then to catharsis and spiritual renewal through the acceptance of interpersonal relationships as the true foundations of a meaningful life. Anne is wrapped up in the secluded world of motherhood, which includes only her and Scotty.

She is affronted by the bakers’ lack of interest in the details of her child’s life. Scotty’s accident shatters her familiar world and she is disoriented: “Howard? I don’t understand” (para. 17). She is so closed to others emotions that even Howard’s demonstration of his love is a burden to her: “Howard’s hand was a weight on her shoulder” (25) and she rejects his comfort: “She took her hand away” (46). It is her son’s accident which finally opens her heart to her husband: “For the first time, she felt they were together in it, … it had (not) only been happening to her and to Scotty” (51).

Scotty’s accident makes her accept Howard completely into her life. She can open her heart to him and confess, “I’m scared to death” (112). She now understands her husband better. After Scotty’s death, in a kind of role reversal, it is Anne who comforts and reassures Howard: “She pulled his head over into her lap and patted his shoulder” (146). The walls of her self-absorption are broken and she is able to empathize with the Negro family in their fear and grief. All her pent-up grief and resentment desperately seek an object to vent their fury against and Anne chooses the baker to be that object.

Howard, living in a precisely ordered world, in which “his life had gone smoothly and to his satisfaction” (7), is cocooned in complacency. Scotty’s accident breaks open his cocoon. He is at a loss to understand the sudden disintegration of his hitherto rational world. He attempts to live up to his expected role of reassuring protector to his wife, but it is he who is more in need of reassurance: “He took her hand and put it in his lap, and this made him feel better” (46). After Scotty’s death, Howard’s indulgence in a paroxysm of weeping is an emotional release, as is his surrender to Anne’s comforting tenderness.

This makes him less prone to hatred of the baker than his wife. In the case of Anne and Howard, Scotty’s accident breaks down the emotional barriers between them: “They seemed to feel each others’ insides now, as though the worry had made them transparent in a perfectly natural way” (69). In the story, it is the baker who is the agent of catharsis, both for himself and for Howard and Anne. He too is isolated in a world of his own: in his case, the world circumscribed by the words, “I’m just a baker” (183), in which he only bakes and counts the pennies to make a living.

However, it is he who takes the first step to reach out to Anne and Howard and lay bare before them his life of emptiness, begging their forgiveness for his blindness to their experience. It is his confession of loneliness which instigates the others to open their own hearts to another’s need, finding in this empathy a spiritual renewal of their own. The eating ritual at the end of the story is ‘the small, good thing’ which has a mystical, almost Eucharistic significance. The dark bread which the baker offers them with the “taste of molasses and coarse grains” (188) is a metaphor for life itself, with its’ joys and sorrows.

In this communion of souls, the three protagonists come to grasp the true meaning of life as the rich intertwining of relationships and openness to sharing the emotions and experiences of others.