The nature of fear is to be scared when you have an uncertainty about something that could be potentially harmful. In The Father, a short story written by Raymond Carver, someone questions whom the newborn baby looks like. A sister to the baby named Carol says that he looks like his father. Then Phyllis starts to wonder whom Daddy looks like. Finally they conclude that Daddy looks like nobody and Phyllis starts to cry. The last sentence of the short story read, “He had turned around in his chair and his face was white and without expression.”

The story The Father demonstrated the nature of fear because Phyllis is uncertain whom the father of the newborn (possibly her father) looks like. There is no proof that they felt fear after he turned around, but based on the way the events in the story are laid out we can infer that the feeling was a mutual fear between the women in the room. This is because they didn’t want the newborn baby to look like nobody, and they weren’t sure if he would. The story The Father shows a good demonstration of the nature of fear, and the length of the story also strikes fear into the reader. It has a cliffhanger-like tone towards the end of the story and makes the reader wonder what happened to the baby and why the father is portrayed so obscurely and “faceless.”

These two examples from The Father prove that fear is what one feels when he/she is uncertain about something that could be potentially harmful to them.