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In this month’s paid subscriber craft post, we’re focusing on how you create characters that come to life in short stories by looking at Henry, the protagonist in Raymond Carver's "What Do You Do in San Francisco?", which is in his brilliant debut collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please.
Henry is a postman in a rural town in 1950s America who lives life by the rules, but his rigid life is disturbed by the arrival of a new family on his route. His opening line is:
"This is nothing to do with me."
This is then followed by lots of info about him and his marriage breakdown, his lack of contact with his kids, his job, his ideas about the world. And even though the narration does appear to centre on the story of the new family, it is in fact all about Henry and it's his beliefs and his morality, as well as his related backstory, that come shining through when he remembers the Marston family that lived on his route for a brief time one summer.
The couple in this new family are what Henry perceives to be "beatniks" as the wife paints, the husband has a beard and no job and the kids are pretty wild by Henry's standards. In short, they go against every way of life that Henry has ever put stock in and you know that he believes his feelings about the couple are completely justified by the troubles that ultimately befall them.
It's a sad story both in what happens to the family and in Henry's inability to think beyond his cultural conditioning and see them for who they really are, rather than what the media has portrayed them to be, which is what Henry has taken as fact.
It's a masterpiece of revealing character through action and in the telling of the Marston's story, Henry reveals so much about himself. How he projects his own sad circumstances onto the breakdown of the Marston's marriage, for me, really showed his narrow mindedness, his ego-centric outlook. Henry is a man who can only understand the world through the filter of himself — how he does things, what he thinks about things, what has happened to him — and he cannot remove himself from being the centre of situations even when they are ultimately nothing to do with him.