“My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed. Sometimes they were led by seeing eye dogs. A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to.”
The quote makes it evident that the media promulgates stereotypes about the sightless people. Even before encountering the blind man, the speaker is opinionated due to the portrayal of blind people in the movies he has viewed. The speaker has an unenthusiastic attitude towards about the blind people makes him irresolute about hosting the blind man.
“She closed her eyes and thought about what she was going to write. This tall, stooped—but handsome!—curly headed stranger with sad eyes walked into our house one fateful night in August.”
Here, Raymond Carver makes use of a Frame Narrative. Bonnie, a character in “Kindling”, starts writing a story about Myers based on her subjective observations. The Frame Narrative enables the reader to understand Myers’ circumstances from Bonnie’s point of view. Also, the Frame Narrative offers the proximate context for the kindling that Myers does later in the story.
“There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But know I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that?”
Mel does not discern how the love that he felt for his ex-wife metamorphosed into detestation. Undoubtedly, love cannot be interminable, and it can effortlessly degenerate into revulsion. It would have been inconceivable for Mel to prognosticate that at some time in life, he would stop adoring his wife, as love is capricious. The conversion of love into animosity is a spectacle that is unexplainable, thus, none of the characters that are listening to Mel can enlighten him satisfactorily, as their views about love are self-contradictory and idiosyncratic.
“When he gets on me , I suddenly feel I am fat, I feel I am terrifically fat, so fat that Rudy is a tiny thing and hardly there at all.”
This quote draws attention to the narrator’s fear of a plump body. She is petrified of being fat. Her fright stems from her encounter with the ‘fattest’ man in a hotel, who she serves a number of meals and he eat the meals within a sitting. Also, Rudy’s account of two ‘fat kids’ (Fat and Wobbly) is a contributing factor in the speaker’s panic. Arguably, based on the speaker’s precipitous feelings of being fat, the speaker may thrust into an eating disorder such as Bulimia to steer clear of plumpness.
