The method Carver uses in "Careful" to portray the ubiquity and desolation of contingency that dominates modern experience is to present a slice of a slice of life. That being so, one is tempted to designate the story as naturalistic, but Carver's language resists that classification because it is more elliptical than it is explanatory. What is not said about the environment, the emotional and psychological content of the characters' experience, and so on is left to the reader's imagination. What the narrative does explicitly reveal ineluctably becomes a set of clues to the content of the textual lacunae.
The bleakness of Lloyd's life is conveyed not by a full explication of why he lives alone in a rented attic. Carver does not spend a lot of time setting up the background for introducing Lloyd and Inez to the reader. Instead, he implies the background and setup by way of the details of Lloyd's routine, which has come down to nothing so much as the project of how he will store and consume his three bottles of cheap champagne as an organizing principle of daily experience. From the observed particulars of Lloyd's outer life and behavior patterns, as well as the glimpses inside his perceptions owing to the narrative point of view, the reader is left to deduce a full range of incident and emotion that must have passed between Inez and Lloyd before he took up residence in a rented room, and to project forward the general content of Lloyd's future.
Inevitably, because of the laconic presentation of fact and incident, the reader must seize upon every detail that is available in the text for clarification of meaning and narrative. Lloyd is middle-aged and might be expected to hold a job, but the fact that he is "trying to do something about his drinking" (Carver 266) yet is eating donuts and champagne for breakfast and at 11:00 a.m. has not changed out of his pajamas suggests that he cannot hold down a job and has not done so for some t...