“No one knows who I am here, but I am afraid all the same.”. This is a sentence from the first paragraph of Raymond Carver’s short story Why, honey? (1970) , where a mother tells about her fears towards her son’s dishonesty and violent behavior as a child, in the form of a letter. It tells an important story on confronting worries about trust, fear, and dishonesty.
First off the most important theme of the short story comes already in the starting paragraph, fear. This can be clearly seen from the line “Who I’m afraid of is him. [the son]”, showing that even after all of these years, she is still terrified of her son. The mother is stricken with fear over her son and his actions. Her fears rise throughout the story from suspecting that her