[In the following essay, Petitjean argues that the narrative design of Coover's short story “The Babysitter” is intended to elicit multiple readings and interpretations.]

Robert Coover's short story “The Babysitter” is not fiction, but fiction(s). Coover presents to the reader all the expository information required of fiction: characters and action. However, it is an impossibility for the reader to organize the action(s) into a cohesive, linear plot; it is also undesirable. “The Babysitter” exploits the art of fiction, the notion of a story, to its full potential, exploding a given situation beyond the limits of linear plot and past the ordinary storytelling conventions of time and space. Coover's tale gives new meaning to reader response, as each permutation and possibility that exists in it is limited only by the imagination of the reader. Narrative development is at the reader's discretion; it is the reader who (re)writes Coover's fiction(s) “The Babysitter” as it is read.

The elements that are part of the basic expository information of “The Babysitter” are, in and of themselves, storytelling conventions. The situation of the story is simple and suburban: a schoolgirl comes to babysit for a couple, who go to a party. The main characters include the babysitter; the Tuckers, Harry and Dolly; the Tucker children, Jimmy, Bitsy, and the baby; the babysitter's boyfriend, Jack; and Jack's friend, Mark. The reader can be certain only that the babysitter arrives at the Tucker home, that the Tuckers leave their home for a party, and that Jack and Mark play pinball. The rest of the story or stories amounts to an indefinite number of situations that are all based on these givens.

These mix-and-match situations give rise to a variety of settings. The action takes place both in the “real world” of the story (at the Tucker home, for example) and in the imaginations of the characters. These imagined settings are no less “real” than the Tucker home, however, and include, among others, the television program being broadcast, the telephone, the bathtub, and a pinball machine. A place is determined to be real or imaginary in “The Babysitter” when the reader decides on a given reading.

Coover's plethora of possibilities begs the question, How does one read “The Babysitter”? The answer: any way one chooses to read it. Only one thing is certain: No reader will ever apprehend the “whole” situation. Coover forces the reader to provide whatever order he or she can.

One way to impose a sense of order on “The Babysitter”—one possible reading among many—is to recover a timeline based on those sections of the story that refer to a specific time given in figures rather than words. The timeline begins at “7:40, ten minutes late,” and Mrs. Tucker calls out, “‘The babysitter's here already’” (78). The next specific time is 8:00, when the babysitter gives Bitsy a bath and the child escapes the tub (81). At 8:30, it is time for recalcitrant Jimmy's bath (86). By 9:00, the babysitter has cleaned up the Tucker kitchen and has settled in front of the television set; she calls out for Jimmy to use the bathroom and brush his teeth, which causes the baby to stir (92). At 10:00, she dozes in front of the television, then “awakes with a start: a babysitter? Did the announcer say something about a babysitter?” (99). Because Coover has given “real” time to these episodes, the reader might assume—for the purpose of one reading—that these sections represent the only “reality” in the story/stories. The “[s]oon to be nine” section is not part of reality, because the time is spelled out rather than given in figures. So, for the purposes of this one reading, real time given in figures represents “reality” for one world of several in “The Babysitter.”

Because all the other actions in this reading take place outside the Tucker home, “reality” can be grounded in the Tucker home. If “reality” is grounded in the Tucker home, then everything outside the home can be considered other, or “nonreality.” Consequently, all the other action(s)—every other situation—may be considered the babysitter's imaginings, including everything from Jack and Mark's pinball game (the babysitter knows the boys play pinball and may imagine them in such a situation, as she may imagine the Tuckers at the party) and fantasy of a three-way sexual situation (read as the babysitter's rape fantasy, or the fantasy of being desired by more than one of her peers at the same time), to Harry Tucker's desire for the babysitter (read as her fantasy of being desired by an older man/father figure), to the absurd game of “Get Dolly Tucker Back in Her Girdle” (read as the babysitter's fantasy of being more desirable than the older woman married to the older man/father figure because the older woman does not possess the babysitter's young, firm body) (95). Such a reading seems appropriate because Coover seems to situate the sexual locus with the babysitter.

This “real-time reading” is just one of many possible readings of “The Babysitter.” Other possible readings of the tangled narrative(s) include a tale of rape (or a three-way sexual situation gone terribly wrong), a Lolita-like tale involving Mr. Tucker and the babysitter, the babysitter's stalking—probably by the boys—rendered in the vein of a '50s drive-in horror movie of the face-in-the-window variety, and even the tale suggested by the last section, ending with the children murdered, Dolly's husband leaving her, a corpse in the bathtub, and the house left a wreck (99). Coover's tale is like a set of Chinese boxes; one narrative thread leads to one narrative universe, which opens upon another narrative thread, which leads to another narrative universe, and another, ad infinitum. The overlapping contexts of all these universes make Coover's unfolding, ever-evolving story dense and rich in its possibilities.

Work Cited

Coover, Robert. “The Babysitter.” The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. Ed. R. V. Cassill. New York: Norton, 1988. 78–99.