I read the small story called ”Why Honey?”, By Raymond Carver. The story is basically a letter from a worried and oppressed mom, a letter in which she describes her life with an oddly behaving and lying son. She is writing The mom constantly finds herself being lied to by his son about such things as the case of their cat dying, his wages, this job and so on. It seems that she’s suspecting that her son is practicing something homicidal, while actually she has no evidence relating to anything. All she has is her imagination and little ’clues’ like the bloody shirt in the trunk of his car. She seems to assume that whatever it is her son is supposedly doing, it’s something criminal and/or violent.
The mother seems very paranoid, she describes how she ’sees’ people spying on her and how she changed her address and got an unlisted number to keep his son from contacting her. She wanted him to think that she was dead. She is writing the letter as a reply to an unknown man who has been asking about her son. At the same time she’s amazed but doesn’t seem to be suspicious of who she’s writing to.
In my opinion, the person she’s writing to is her son after all. I can’t really justify my suspicions, I just feel like it, and it would kind of fit the overall theme of the whole story. In the end I think that the son wasn’t the one acting weird and suspiciously, I think that mother herself is the one who’s insane, judging from her actions and the way she writes and describes the whole story. After all, her son turned out to be very successful, which could be quite unusual for a homicidal and lunatic person.