What makes Raymond Carver's "Fat" good?
There's enough there to sympathize, but not enough to confidently empathize
Spoilers ahead. I encountered this story in the collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? If you want to read it for free, somebody pasted it here.
A waitress tells her friend Rita about having served a severely obese man who refers to himself as “we” instead of “I.” She goes out of her way to make him feel at ease, but her coworkers, including her partner Rudy, ruthlessly mock him. Although they presumably do this beyond the fat man’s earshot, we get the sense that he knows that his appearance raises eyebrows (“Believe me, he says, we don’t eat like this all of the time,” “Believe it or not, he says, we have not always eaten like this”). Later at home Rudy begins having intercourse with her without her permission, which we infer is standard operating procedure in their relationship. Suddenly, she feels fat, so fat that Rudy is “a tiny thing and hardly there at all.” Rita is surprised that the unwanted sex is where the anecdote ends and is unsure how to react. In the final line, the waitress asserts privately, “My life is going to change. I feel it.”
The waitress does not tell us why she believes her life will change. She also offers us little insight into why she reports “I feel depressed,” in response to Rita’s disappointment that the story did not contain juicy gossip. She traces a coworker mocking the fat man behind his back, “Margo says to me, Who’s your fat friend? He’s really a fatty,” to her ennui: “Now that’s part of it. I think that really is part of it.” But what does “that” refers to? That Margo puts the fat man down with so much glee? That she is embarrassed by Margo’s insinuation that she has affection for the fat man?
Whatever the story loses in clarity it gains in tension. An ostensibly ordinary interaction is transformed into a lifechanging event—only we do not know what the transformation consists of. By withholding so much Carver risks his six-page story coming off like a vignette, a slice-of-life that does little other than make us feel world sick about everyday sadism. We could accuse Carver of not actually having anything profound to say, and of using evasiveness to trick us into thinking that he does.
My thesis is that the waitress’s proclamations are vague because she is still working out how she feels. The fact that the story is in the present-tense is one hint that her self-reflection has only just begun. The main evidence is that although she is able to report on the general valence of her feelings, the character of her inner monologue is inchoate. After going out of her way to make the fat man feel comfortable, she reflects, “I know I was after something. But I don’t know what.” When he later thanks her for serving him dessert (and perhaps implicitly for not shaming him for ordering two desserts), she recalls, “a feeling comes over me.” But what feeling? Sympathy? Pity? Guilt for not telling her coworkers to leave this poor, insecure man alone? It seems that she knows that she is dissatisfied, but does not know exactly what she wants.
From this perspective, it is difficult to imagine enjoying a more transparent version of “Fat.” Imagine if the narrator was highly articulate. In lieu of “Now that’s part of it. I think that really is part of it,” she could say, “How can so many people get their kicks out of kicking others when they are down? I can’t just square it.” Replace “My life is going to change. I feel it,” with “I am going to ditch this provincial dump, or at least tell Rudy that he needs to seduce me before sex.” OK, less oblique prose could be more compelling than that, but you get the idea.
What makes “Fat” worth reading is the opportunity to witness the waitress’s incipient realization that she is so alienated from the life she lives that she feels less kinship with her partner or friends than she does with the object of their contempt. Before serving the fat man she did not think anything could or should be done about Margo’s impropriety (“I’ve told you about Margo? The one who chases Rudy?”), Rudy’s narrow-mindedness (“Rudy, he is fat, I say, but that is not the whole story”), or Rita’s superficiality (“That’s a funny story, Rita says, but I can tell she doesn’t know what to make of it…But I won’t go into it with her. I’ve already told her too much”). But afterwards, it begins to dawn on her that she accepts others as they are, treating their flaws as due to circumstance not character. And that while this has allowed her to see the humanity of the fat man, it has also has cost her dearly.
We do not know whether she will ever see her predicament clearly or discover a better alternative. This is sad but it is also how the process of self-insight actually unfolds. Had the waitress been perfectly aware of why her life is unsatisfactory, we would wonder why she would regard the interaction with the fat man as noteworthy. We would also wonder why she had not made some changes long ago.
Postscript:
Having the fat man refer to himself in the third person is one of my favorite character development choices in all of literature. It instantly makes him a particular individual, not just a generic compulsive eater. And while it is extremely odd, it does not beggar belief that someone, at least one person out there does this. In fact, this aspect of the story is apparently biographical: Carver’s then-wife had actually served an overweight man who referred to himself as “we.” And just likes the waitress’s insistence that her life is going to change in some unspecified way, his mannerism provides endless fodder for the imagination. Does he do this to acknowledge that he weighs as much as two non-obese people put together? Does he view himself as a separate entity from his body, not defined by it?