LITERATURE: Promise of Rain – Taylor’s Unreliable Narrator

There are similarities between Peter Taylor’s stories in the first person pov and Raymond Carver’s Cathedral. What has become prominent for me is the way he handles the narrator’s evaluation of another character’s actions.  There is an underlying theme that is quite contrary to the words the narrator speaks.

In Promise of Rain, the narrator describes a frustration with his youngest son who in his opinion is very different than his siblings in ways that embarrass the father.  Hugh is goodlooking and has a habit of studying himself in mirrors.  He is also less ambitious than the others–whose ambition often has merely been marrying well.  He bounces from one thing to another in trying to find himself, and actiing, above schoolwork, may be one thing that suits him.  In the pursuit of improving himself, he has been practicing elocution and the father describes how Hugh is anxiously watching the weather and recharging old radio batteries in the hope that a local game will be called because of rain and the station will instead play a ten minute speech by Hugh as a local service.  The father, on the other hand, is looking forward to hearing the game.

I knew why Hugh kept looking out the windows, and soon I was looking out windows, too.  The rain came down pretty steady all morning and only began to let up about noon.  I found I was pitting my hopes against his.  I was, at least, until I saw how awfully worked up the boy was.  Than I tried my best to hope with him.  But I don’t think I ever before had such mixed feelings about so small a thing as whether or not a ball game would be rained out.  (p. 112)

What the narrator is saying that as a father he switched from his own hopes to hear the game to ‘try’ his best to hope for the opposite for his son’s sake.  What’s particularly telling is his statement that he"had such mixed feelings about so small a thing as" whether the game would be rained out!  He doesn’t say a big thing like his son’s talk on the radio, but refers to the ball game instead.

There are many instances where the narrator says something that can be taken sarcastically, or condescendingly, and puts himself in a position of trying his best for the boy but continually being disappointed.  Hugh is bright and remains cheerful, and often we get the idea that his father is misreading him badly.  But what comes through even stronger, to me, is that the narrator is not telling us how he really feels.