Why, Honey?

Raymond Carver

The novell ”Why, Honey?” tells about a boy who does not behave like normal. In the beginning of the story his mother is wondering why her son became a man like that. He gets outbursts and cannot tell the truth. His behavior is extremely odd and scary. The mother is scared of him and waits his return. She has had to change her name, home address and phone number as unlisted. All this started by their cat’s death when he was 15 years old.

Their neighbour tells her that he saw two boys putting firecrackers to the cat’s ears which were also cut up. She cannot believe him blaming her sun for killing their cat brutally. In other case he is working as a stockboy in a local store and buys an expensive gift to his mum. She is totally surprised and happy using his wages for her. Unfortunately she finds a stub in his pocket during doing the laundry and noticed that he had lied. The price of the gift is a lot lower as he has claimed.

He continued acting unusually. In addition of lying he got an outburst his mother and yelled that get out of here and was sick of her spying all the time. The very strange thing is that on the following day he acts like nothing would ever happened. He is psychotic. He has also a gun and a knife in his car and spends nights gone from home. As a result, on one morning the mother finds a bloody t-shirt in his car. Everything concludes his and his mother’s conversation in which he insists her mother to kneel. She runs to her room and locks the door. While she is in her room he is gone. She will ever meet him again.

In my opinion the mother has enough evidence to claim his son because of his behavior and especially the gun and the knife in the car. The bloody t-shirt is only an excuse. She is, as she says, entitled to hear the truth as his mother. The way how she is presenting the information is justifying and desperate, which makes it sound sinister. Despite all those things he will be elected governor.

It is very important to the narrator that someone knows this story besides the narrator. She is wondering how the recipient knows her address. In my opinion the narrator is reliable. Why she wrote if she would not be trustworthy? The recipient must be someone of whom she can trust. Otherwise she would not tell that story.