The Bath by Raymond Carver
"The Bath" is a short story by Raymond Carver that first appeared in his collection "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" and was later revised and expanded into "A Small, Good Thing." Both versions center on a couple grappling with the traumatic aftermath of their son being hit by a car on his eighth birthday, leaving him in a coma. A significant element of the narrative is the distress caused by anonymous phone calls from a baker regarding a birthday cake the wife had ordered for their son. In "The Bath," the focus is on the couple's disquieting experience with the calls, presenting a stark and neutral tone.
In contrast, "A Small, Good Thing" delves deeper into the emotional struggles of the parents, portraying a richer, more sympathetic exploration of their grief and connection as they wait for their son’s recovery. The revision offers a more realistic depiction of their middle-class life disrupted by tragedy and culminates in a moment of reconciliation with the baker, emphasizing themes of human connection and healing. The transformation from the stark ending of "The Bath" to the more hopeful conclusion in "A Small, Good Thing" reflects Carver’s evolving narrative style and thematic focus, shifting from existential uncertainty to a more affirmative view of life’s complexities.
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The Bath by Raymond Carver
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1981 (collected in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, 1981; revised as “A Small, Good Thing,” 1983)
Type of work: Short story
The Work
“The Bath,” which originally appeared in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, reappeared in the Cathedral collection, revised and renamed “A Small, Good Thing.” The second version is also reprinted in Carver’s final collection, Where I’m Calling From.
Both versions of the story focus on a couple whose son is hit by a car on his eighth birthday and who is hospitalized and in a coma. This horrifying event is made more upsetting by the fact that the couple receives annoying anonymous telephone calls from a baker from whom the wife had earlier ordered a custom-made birthday cake for the child. “The Bath” is a brief story, told in Carver’s early, neutralized style, focusing less on the feelings of the couple than on the mysterious and perverse interruption of the persistent anonymous calls.
The revision, “A Small, Good Thing,” is five times longer than “The Bath.” It develops the emotional life of the couple in more sympathetic detail, suggesting that their prayers for their son bind them together in a genuine human communion that they have never felt before. The parents are given more of a sense of everyday human reality in the revision, and their situation is made more conventionally realistic. The father feels that his life has gone smoothly until this point, and the story thus suggests that neither he nor his wife have ever had their comfortable, middle-class lives threatened by such a terrifying disruption before. Much of the detail of the revision follows the parents as they anxiously wait for their son to come out of his comatose state. Whereas the mysterious voice on the phone throughout “The Bath” suggests some perverse interference in their lives, in “A Small, Good Thing” the voice suggests a more concerned presence who always asks them if they have forgotten about their son Scotty.
The most radical difference in the revision, however, can be seen in the conclusion. Whereas in the first version the child’s death abruptly ends the story, in the second, the couple discover that it is the baker who has been calling and go visit him after the boy’s death. He shares their sorrow; they share his loneliness. The story ends in reconciliation in the warm and comfortable bakery as the couple, in an almost Christian ritual of breaking bread together, eat the baker’s bread and talk into the early morning, not wanting to leave—as if a retreat into the communal reality of the bakery marks the true nature of a healing unification.
Although the earlier version of the story seems to have been repudiated by Carver, the revisions that created the new story, “A Small, Good Thing,” provide a striking example of how Carver’s writing style and thematic concerns changed after his first two collections. Whereas “The Bath” is a story about a mysterious eruption into any life, “A Small, Good Thing” is a story that moves toward a more conventionally moral ending of acceptance. The image of the parents in the warm, sweet-smelling bakery, momentarily reconciled by their sense of communion with the baker, is a clear indication of Carver’s moral shift from the skeptical to the affirmative, from the sense of the unspeakable mystery of human life to the sense of how simple and moral life is, after all.
Bibliography
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Campbell, Ewing. Raymond Carver: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1992.
Gallagher, Tess. Soul Barnacles: Ten More Years with Ray. Edited by Greg Simon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.
Halpert, Sam. Raymond Carver: An Oral Biography. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995.
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Nesset, Kirk. The Stories of Raymond Carver: A Critical Study. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995.
Powell, Jon. “The Stories of Raymond Carver: The Menace of Perpetual Uncertainty.” Studies in Short Fiction 31 (Fall, 1994): 647-656.
Runyon, Randolph Paul. Reading Raymond Carver. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1992.
Saltzman, Arthur M. Understanding Raymond Carver. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988.
Stull, William L., and Maureen P. Carroll, eds. Remembering Ray: A Composite Biography of Raymond Carver. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra Press, 1993.