Excess and Lack in Fat by Raymond Carver Essay Example

in vain, leaving us seemingly unprepared for the final line: “My life is going to change. I feel it. ”

Since we know next to nothing about the waitress’ life and her background, much less the other characters in the restaurant, we are led to ask: “What is the connection, if at all, between her encounter with a fat man and her life? Is this encounter so life changing? In what way will her life change? In the story the waitress told to Ruby, the plot is flat – nothing seems to be happening.

The fat man speaks in the first person plural – “we” – which signals to us that he is a metonym or a representative of other less fortunate and stigmatized people in a setting characterized by excess – of food and fat, on one hand, and lack of basic human sensitivity and decency, on the other. We follow the story’s progression according to the sequence of ingesting food – from the Caesar’s salad, to the bread, the soup, and then on to dessert. The ordering, serving and partaking of the menu are interspersed with the characters’ comments about the girth and grotesqueness of the unusual but gracious customer.

The telling is monotonous and repetitive, perhaps in keeping with the waitress’ mesmerized mode of storytelling, but also perhaps in keeping with the routine and tedium of her oppressive daily life. Why spend so much time – perhaps more than 2/3 of the story – on this seemingly mundane ritual of ordering, serving and eating? Why is there too much stress on the fatness of the man’s fingers, his puffing, the quickness by which he finishes

off his food, his apologetic manner, and the waitress’ and her co-workers’ cruel comments?

Perhaps on a metaphorical level, the fat, the bodily excess concretely manifest the waitress’ own excessive sense of lack and loss: an unsatisfactory sexual and emotional relationship with an excessively insensitive boyfriend; a tedious job with its demanding customers and uncivil working environment; superficial friendships with women like Ruby to whom she can only reveal so much. One of the most telling passages is the one right before the end, when the waitress has finished telling us the story she told to Ruby- the part where she brings us to their bed, and Rudy, the boyfriend begins to make love almost as soon as the light turns off.

She begins to “relax,” she says, “though it is against my will. But here is the thing. When he gets on me, I suddenly feel fat. I feel I am terribly fat, so fat that Rudy is a tiny thing and hardly there at all (emphasis mine). ” Fat thus becomes a metaphor for lack of warmth, sensitivity in a sexual relationship based on coitus rather than affection, as well as excess of disgust and dissatisfaction on the part of the waitress. Feeling fat obliterates Rudy, who, in the final analysis is actually a tiny, insignificant thing.

This passage thus foreshadows in a few choice words, the change that she predicts will happen to her in the concluding sentence. The encounter with a physically-challenged man – the literal and metaphoric embodiment of her life’s excesses and losses - can indeed prove to be a watershed and life-changing event. Characters like the waitress, as I have mentioned,

is one typical Carver character, one of those ordinary people, often middle or lower middle class living lives of sadness and desolation.

But this excess of sadness is told sparingly, with an economy of words and plot structure that show and don’t tell, revealing only so much, and allowing us more elbow room to draw our own conclusions. Had the point of view been omniscient and not that of the waitress’ limited, first person perspective and had the structure been straight storytelling and had not been story-within-a-story, the irony between excess (fat, the apparent subject matter) and lack (emotional, psychological) would not have been as pronounced.

While more information could have been made more available in the straight story told by an omniscient narrator, the result would not have been as telling and as robust. Reminiscent of Hemingway, Chekov and other lean and mean storytellers, such style and strategy dramatically captures the excess and lack of our excessive yet emotionally bleak and depleted contemporary landscape.