"Popular Mechanics"

"Popular Mechanics"
by Raymond Carver

Solomon and the baby

This whole story made me very sad.  The author makes it clear that a couple is fighting and the man is leaving.  They fight over the baby, and at the end the author gets a little vague.  “In this manner, the issue was decided” (Carver, 335).  Out of context, this phrase makes no sense.  But read in the context of the previous few lines, in which the author describes both the man and woman having a tight hold of the baby’s arms and pulling very hard, the reader infers that that “issue” that was “decided” was the man and the woman physically pulling the baby apart.  This is very similar to the Bible story in I Kings 3:16-28.  The difference in the Bible story though, is that the real mother loved the baby enough to give it up for the sake of its life.  The couple in the short story were selfish and only thought of themselves, which resulted in them physically tearing the baby apart, killing it.  The couple is like the other woman in the Bible story, who was so selfish and spiteful, that she was willing to have the baby cut in half so that the other woman could not have him. Verse 26, talking about the other woman, "But the other said, 'Neither I not you shall have him. Cut him in two!'"  While the man and the woman in "Popular Mechanics" did not come right out and say this, that is essentially what they both felt, leading to neither of them having the baby.