In Raymond Carver’s “Fat”, the narrator, who works as a waitress in a diner, tells her friend about how she recently served a very fat customer.
He is soft-spoken and she serves him a huge meal while her co-workers, including her husband, dish out disparaging comments about the man’s size.
Her husband even tells her about the fat kids he and his friends used to body shame when they were younger. One of them, a neighbour of her husband when he was a child, they called “Fat”. Could “Fat” be the one eating at the diner?
The narrator suddenly sees the superficiality of the people working with her. And this leads her to think about what would happen if she had a kid with her husband, and the child grew up to be that size. She imagines herself the same size as the customer, dwarfing her husband.
Did the customer become so big because of psychological trauma in his youth? Did he become like this because of the abuse of people like her husband, his friends, her co-workers? We sense the narrator is processing questions such as these even though she doesn’t articulate them; maybe she doesn’t dare to.
Yet, by the end of the story, we learn she has taken a decision that will change her life, and the reader can’t help wondering if it means she will leave her job and her husband behind. And we can’t but root for her.
Alberico Collina
He is soft-spoken and she serves him a huge meal while her co-workers, including her husband, dish out disparaging comments about the man’s size.
Her husband even tells her about the fat kids he and his friends used to body shame when they were younger. One of them, a neighbour of her husband when he was a child, they called “Fat”. Could “Fat” be the one eating at the diner?
The narrator suddenly sees the superficiality of the people working with her. And this leads her to think about what would happen if she had a kid with her husband, and the child grew up to be that size. She imagines herself the same size as the customer, dwarfing her husband.
Did the customer become so big because of psychological trauma in his youth? Did he become like this because of the abuse of people like her husband, his friends, her co-workers? We sense the narrator is processing questions such as these even though she doesn’t articulate them; maybe she doesn’t dare to.
Yet, by the end of the story, we learn she has taken a decision that will change her life, and the reader can’t help wondering if it means she will leave her job and her husband behind. And we can’t but root for her.
Alberico Collina
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