“The Barter” by Carol Oates

In a recent post, I wrote about the influence of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief; and while reading through the stories of one of Joyce Carol Oates’s collections, Sourland, I came across yet another short story which has, at its center, one of these stages: Bargaining. In “The Barter,” by Oates, a 13 year-old boy must cope with his father’s hospitalization for severe atrial fibrillation. The title itself makes evident the protagonist’s struggle, but the story’s opening lines are even more powerful: “Let something of mine be taken from me! Let Father be returned to us. So the son David Rainey, thirteen years old, who prided himself on not-believing-in-God, prayed” (Oates 153). This kind of bargaining is striking even for someone who subscribes to a religion, so the fact that Oates includes the detail of David’s atheism is a mark of just how terrified the boy is.

In fact, the raw details that “The Barter” contains are what make it so relatable. Of the boy’s family, Oates writes, “All of them were distracted and not themselves. Mother on the telephone, Mother walking slowly through the rooms she seemed not to recognize” (Oates 160). This is an accurate portrait of family members experiencing the anxiety of possible loss. Later, the author writes about David’s feelings of confusion: “How long he wandered about in the sleety rain, on the driveway, in the grass, tilting his head back, exposing his throat, he wouldn’t know. Lost track of time. Thinking, This might be the last night I have a father” (Oates 163). In his state of panic, David seems unaware of his surroundings or actions.  All he can focus on is the fate of his father. In the hospital, he ruminates, “Each room exuded the possibility of the empty bed” (Oates 162). David lives in constant fear that he will arrive at the hospital only to find that his father has died and has been taken from his room. David’s mother sums up this kind of thinking: “Mother was saying in her new, wondering voice, ‘The life we live in our bodies, it’s so strange, isn’t it? You don’t ever think how you got in. But you come to think obsessively how you’ll be getting out’” (Oates 164). The mother’s voice is “wondering” precisely because of her exposure to near-death; it has caused her to think more about it and what it means, and I think that this is something that happens to everybody at one point or another.

“How long he wandered about in the sleety rain, on the driveway, in the grass, tilting his head back, exposing his throat, he wouldn’t know. Lost track of time.”

–Joyce Carol Oates

Another moment I find both realistic and emotional is the one in which David contemplates what he must give up in order to have his father back: “Would he give up his trombone? His friends? His high grades? His special feeling for math? His soul?” (Oates 160). The “soul” is casually thrown in among the other, pettier things that David prioritizes in his life, as if it’s unimportant. But it demonstrates how willing David is to make a sacrifice in order for his father to regain his health. The stylistic choices Oates intentionally makes are prominent elsewhere as well, like in the description of Mr. Rainey’s incident: “The father hadn’t died, though he’d been near unconscious and on an oxygen machine, three hours in the emergency room and eleven hours in intensive care and then transferred to room 833, a private room where at last anxious relatives could visit him, cautioned not to crowd around his bed and not to tire him” (Oates 155-156). Oates does not create a run-on sentence accidentally; rather, she uses it to convey the apprehension that resulted from the event, and to simulate the tumult of the situation. She also communicates this disturbance through metaphors: “Then he’d gone to bed and was wakened, it seemed, almost immediately, by his mother’s panicked cry outside his door, and from that moment onward the world’s surfaces had become tilted and slip sliding” (Oates 155). David feels rocky from the moment he becomes involved in this situation, and struggles to keep himself steady.

“The “soul” is casually thrown in among the other, pettier things that David prioritizes in his life, as if it’s unimportant”

However, by the end of the story he is happy, or at least relieved, because he feels that he has finally made the sacrifice he has been needing for his father to get better. Though it comes in the form of his being beaten up by two other boys, it more than suffices for him: “Afterward he would realize that the brothers had deliberately spared his face. He wasn’t bleeding, he’d have no visible marks. Always, he’d be grateful for this” (Oates 169). Though this gratefulness seems to be for the lack of scars he will incur, it is really meant on a deeper level, for David finally feels the peace of mind he has been searching for. Although the story ends here, not saying whether David’s father lives or dies, the reader is left with the feeling that, either way, everything is going to be okay.

More SevenPonds Book Reviews:

• 

Revelations for the Dying in the Tibetan Book of the Dead
  
• 

Book Review: “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” by Mitch Albom
  
• Book Review: “A Grief Observed” by C.S. Lewis