ime. The fact that he has been through an "assessment" of his marriage with Inez suggests that she threw him out of the house after perhaps years of quarrels and confrontations. The physically circumscribed nature of his rented attic also bespeaks a descent into the low-rent margins of society.
The laconic presentation of fact and incident also becomes fodder for narrative irony. When Lloyd is lying on his side waiting for his ear to clear, he "looked at the things in the room from this new perspective. But it wasn't any different from the old way of looking, except that everything was on its side" (Carver 273).
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