Where I’m Calling From – Raymond Carver

In this short story, “Where I’m Calling From”, Raymond Carver definitely practices what he preaches. His use of having “some feeling of threat or a sense of menace” adds more appeal the story for readers, because speaking for myself, the feeling of threat/menace was the idea that the narrator’s wife was cheating on the narrator with the blind man. Additional to this, the blind man would now be staying at the narrator’s home! To me, this is as horrible as it can get. To think, that if the blind man was actually the third person in their relationship, that the narrator would be housing and feeding the one person that was betraying him, with his own wife, in his own house. And another thing is the fact that Carver does not explicitly state this. He says all these little things, like how his wife has kept in touch with this man for such a long time, and how they were childhood lovers. The tension is apparent when they first meet, from the narrator’s point of view at least, as well as when they sit down to talk afterwards, especially because the wife seems so infatuated by the blind man, and in turn, turned off by the narrative, her husband. It sort of augments until the point where they finally connect over something randomly, which ends the tension between them. The tension never really fades until then. I think Raymond Carver is quite skilled at incorporating the feeling of tension and menace, because I was feeling it throughout the entire story. If that’s what he was going for, props to him!