Viewfinder (short story)

Viewfinder by Raymond Carver is one of the short stories in the What We Talk About When We Talk About Love compilation. It is told in the first person perspective of a man who is visited by an elderly man with hook hands. The man comes to his house to try and sell him a picture of the narrator's house. The narrator is obsessed with the fact that the elderly man has hook hands and invites him into his house to see how he will hold a cup of coffee with his hook hands. The narrator decides to have the hookhanded man take more pictures in his house. The story ends with the narrator climbing onto the roof so that his picture could be taken as he throws a rock off the roof.

Indicative of Carver's often dissociative and working class themes, the story focuses on the connection between physical and social deformity, the hook arms a shadow of the narrator's anti-social behavior.