Narrator and point of view

The narrator of the story “Why, Honey?” by Raymond Carver is also the protagonist – the mother. She is the one who writes the letter to an unnamed man who demanded to know something about the past of the woman’s son.

The story becomes a first-person narration and takes the form of the letter that the woman writes. An interesting thing about the letter is that it is not signed. This could mean that the mother deliberately chose not to sign her real name or that something happened to her before she managed to end the letter.

As a narrator, the mother is explicit, as she directly depicts the situations in which she has realized that her son is a pathological liar: “He laughed, he always had a laugh for you. He said he would keep the gun and the ...