Raymond Carver’s a Small, Good Thing and Joyce Carol Oates’s Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been, Book Review Example

The writers of fiction often throw their characters into the whirl of terrifying situations and coincidences. Characters lose their children, fall into the trap of an unknown man’s charm, or simply decide to change their lives. More often than not, terrifying situations are a good test to each character’s emotional and moral stability. In Raymond Carver’s A Small, Good Thing and Joyce Carol Oates’s Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? the sense of terror is integrally linked to the sense of the unknown, as well as each character’s inability to establish closer ties with the surrounding reality and to learn from it.

In Carver’s story, Ann Weiss spends several days in the atmosphere of terror. The latter is not simply the result of her child having been hit by a car; this terror burdens her as she is trying to understand why her son does not wake up: “I want to talk to the doctor. I don’t think he should keep sleeping like this. I don’t think that’s a good sign” (Carver). Ann Weiss cannot understand the reason of her son’s deep sleep. More importantly, she fails to establish close ties with the surrounding reality and the people around her. The lack of these ties and Ann’s failure to share her grief with other people add to her terrible emotional state and aggravate her terror: “She would have liked to have said something else about the accident, […] yet she didn’t know how to begin” (Carver). The lack of compassion, care, and visible indifference of the doctor himself confuse Ann Weiss and do not give her a chance to better understand the world.

In Oates’s story, Connie finds herself in a similar situation. She spends her life in the world of dreams and illusions. However, the sense of terror in Connie is somewhat different from that in Ann Weiss – it resembles a combination of fear and sweet longing to taste the forbidden fruit. With time, this feeling turns into a synergy of animal fear, dismay, startle, and an urgent desire to wake up from the nightmare: “She began to scream into the phone, into the roaring. She cried out, she cried for her mother, she felt her breath start jerking back and forth in her lungs” (Oates). Connie is not willing to establish close connections with her family members and strives to cut herself from her family reality. For this reason, she cannot anticipate the tragedy, nor can she escape the inevitable. What seems important, however, is that for both Ann Weiss and Connie the sense of terror becomes the driver that changes their views on the world and makes them adjust to the new conditions of the surrounding reality. They both change their perceptions about and attitudes toward people through the disappointment, pain, suffering, and inner transformation which accompany the feeling of terror in both stories.

Works Cited

Carver, R. “A Small, Good Thing”, University at Buffalo. University a Buffalo, n.d. Web. 10 July 2010.

Oates, J.C. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, A Joyce Carol Oates Home Page. Web. 10 July 2010.