An Acquired Taste

A Small, Good Thing

I think that if I were to sum up this story into one word I would say it would be suspense. The story starts out with an ordinary mom ordering a cake for her son’s birthday. My first impression was that this would be another boring story like Feathers. I soon found out I was wrong. The story quickly escalates into a very tense mood when the child is hit by a car. I was constantly wondering whether the child would perish or wake up. To be honest, I thought the kid would wake up. “He’s out of any real danger, I’d say that for certain…” (Pg. 66) I think Carver used the dressed up doctor as figure of truth so he could mislead the reader into thinking the child is going to survive. In my case, I would say that he succeeded.

“… as if suddenly remembering and feeling guilty.” (Pg. 69) I thought it was very weird that Scotty’s parents felt guilty about leaving their son in the hospital. I think that to feel guilty you have to do something bad previously. Neither Howard nor Ann did something wrong, why were they feeling so guilty? As the story went on, I noticed that Ann would act weird because of her guilt. In page 74, she explains her son’s situation to a family of strangers instead of just asking for the location of the elevator. Why was this necessary?

During the scene of the black family I noticed that Carver gives us foreshadowing. “…these people who were in the same kind of waiting she was in.” Then, in page 78, the nurses tell Ann that the black kid had died. At this time we still didn’t know what was going to happen with Scotty, but these clues gave me a little bit of information to work with.

Yet again, Carver uses repetition to give a scene a certain mood. In page 75, almost every sentence begins with the word “She”. I concluded that Carver wanted to stress that she was completely alone when she arrived to her house.

Towards the end, I thought the story changed course completely. First there was this tense and suspenseful mood, but the couple goes to the baker, the mood changes into this mushy heartbroken scene that ruins the whole story.

Even though I didn’t appreciate the end, I enjoyed the story as a whole. Carver’s writing has grown on me.