Raymond Carver’s “Popular Mechanics”, Essay Example

Author Raymond Carver was a well-respected fiction writer and poet, known primarily for his powerful short stories (Halpert, pvii, 1995). Although Carver utilized different writing styles and approaches over the course of his career, he was known primarily as a part of the minimalist movement, which used bold, direct language to tell stories (Clark, p240, 1991). His short story “Popular Mechanics” is a good example of this minimalist approach to writing, as it is very brief and does not offer very many details. Taking such an approach to writing means that every word has to count, and in “Popular Mechanics” Carver offers readers just enough information to be horrified by what transpires in the story. The events in “Popular Mechanics” take place over the course of only a few minutes, and the story ends on a shocking note. Despite being so brief, “Popular Mechanics” touches on a number of themes about relationships, power struggles between men and women, and the effects that a deteriorating marriage can have on children.

In “Popular Mechanics,” Carver tells the story of a couple in the moments taking place as they are breaking up. There are three people involved in the story, although none of them are named. There is a man, a woman, and a baby, and they are referred to only as “he,” “she,” and “the baby.” It is not even certain whether or not the baby is a boy or a girl, and the baby really only serves as an object for the man and woman to fight over. Carver uses details about the weather to reflect on what is happening between the man and the woman, writing “cars slushed by on the street outside, where it was getting dark. But it was getting dark on the inside too.” Although it was getting to be late in the day, the “dark on the inside” Carver describes is clearly not only a physical darkness, but is also a reference to the emotional darkness that is building as the argument between the man and the woman escalates. The man is packing his suitcase and preparing to leave when the woman comes home, holding the baby. She tells him that she is happy he is leaving, but it seems clear to the reader that happiness is not an emotion that either one is feeling in the moment that he is preparing to leave.

As the ma continues to pack his suitcase, the wife sees that he has a picture of the bay lying on the bed, and it appears that he intends to take it with him. She snatches the picture away and leaves the room with the picture and the baby. The man follows her into the kitchen, and the fight gets worse. They start off by fighting over the picture, but end up fighting over the actual baby. When the man tells the woman that he intends to take the baby with him, she simply replies “you’re crazy.” In this time period, it would have been uncommon for a child to end up with the father instead of the mother, so the comment about the man being “crazy” is not just about this particular family and this particular baby, but about the entire idea of a man taking a baby at the demise of a marriage. Despite the fact that both the man and the woman want to keep the baby, the fight they end up having over the baby puts the baby’s safety at risk. The man and the woman both appear to be failing as parents, as they show more concern for their own wishes and seem more interested in winning an argument than doing what is best for the baby.

As they fight over the baby, each of them has a hold of it, and is trying to pull it away from the other one. During the scuffle between the man and the woman “they knocked down a flowerpot that hung behind the stove,” which makes it clear that the physical confrontation between them is becoming dangerous and causing physical damage. Despite the damage to the flowerpot, the two continue to fight over the baby, each of them pulling at the baby’s arms and trying to push the other away. As the man slips the woman’s fingers off the baby’s arm one by one, and she begins to lose her grip, “she grabbed for the baby’s other arm” while the man “pulled back very hard,” At this point the baby is nothing more than an object, like a piece of rope the man and woman use to play a game of tug-of-war. Although Carver does not specify what exactly happens to the baby, it becomes clear that it was seriously injured as the man “pulled back very hard,” and the story ends with the words “in this manner, the issue was decided.” The man may have “won” the physical battle over the baby as he was fighting with the woman, but it was the baby who lost when it was damaged just like the flowerpot in the kitchen, becoming just an object for the two people to fight over.

What makes the story “Popular Mechanics” so powerful and horrifying is that Carver leaves it to the imagination of each reader to picture what sort of injury the baby receives, and even which parent keeps the baby. It appears that the baby’s arm was likely broken during the fight, or it may have even been pulled out of the socket. Even though both the man and the woman were fighting over the baby, it was clearly the man’s physical strength that allowed him to overcome the force of the woman pulling the baby away. It was also this physical strength that ended up injuring the baby, and it seems likely that once an ambulance or the police are called that it is the man who will bear the responsibility for the injury and the woman who will end up with the baby. In this brief story, carver manages to explore themes about how men and women try to hold power over each other in relationships, how society’s roles for men and women influence behavior and outcomes, and how the damage caused by a failing relationship can affect not just the people in the relationship, but also the innocent bystanders who do not have any power to fight back.

Works Cited

Clark, Miriam M. “Raymond Carver’s Monologic Imagination.” Modern Fiction Studies37.2 (1991): 240-247. Web. 21 Oct. 2013.

Halpert, Sam. Raymond Carver: An Oral Biography. Iowa City, Iowa: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1995. Print.

“Popular Mechanics.” TESL Times: reading and writing-based site including activities, links, and lesson plans for ESL students and teachers. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Oct. 2013.