SAC Paragraph - "Neighbors" by Raymond Carver

"In the morning he had Arlene call in for him."

With this sentence, Carver succinctly conveys the shift in his character's attitude towards his forays into his neighbours' apartment. Whereas before, at the start of the story, the act of exploring the Stones' apartment was just something a little different and exciting to do, it has now quickly become almost an obsession. Bill doesn't even want to go to work anymore and gets his wife to call in sick for him. He tries to distract himself and stop thinking about the apartment across the hall. "He tried to start a book" but that didn't work so "He went out for a walk and felt better." While outside, he is fine, but as soon as he re-enters the building, he wants to go into the Stones' place again. He at first tried to make excuses, as if suspecting that he was doing something wrong by trespassing, by stopping by his neighbours' door "on the chance he might hear the cat moving about", but eventually couldn't control himself anymore and "went to the kitchen for the key."

In this short paragraph, filled with brief, declarative sentences, Carver is showing the reader how the decision to first enter the neighbours’ place has affected and changed Bill. The shortness of the sentences shows a restlessness, mirroring Bill's inability to stay focused on anything other than the Stones' apartment.

The strength of his obsession (and later Arlene's) reveals the couple to be unhappy with their lives. At the beginning, we learnt that they constantly compare themselves to the Stones and it seems that these excursions into the Stones' home are their version of the holidays that the Stones always seem to take. The Millers find their own lives to be ordinary and dull, empty, while the Stones' lives seem "fuller and brighter", so they venture across the hall to try and discover what it's like to be someone else, their neighbours - perhaps attempting to find what is missing from their own lives.

Through the rest of the story, the Millers are revealed to be quite voyeuristic in their obsession with the Stones' apartment, but at the same time, their experience is quite ordinary, something that could happen to anyone, because it is a common human experience to feel jealous or "passed by somehow" and to wonder what life is like in someone else's shoes and what makes their life seem better than ours.

By Maddy, Genny and Maeve