Robert Coover’s disjointed short story “The Babysitter” explores the complex and interconnected psychosexual fantasies that lie beneath much of our normal everyday behavior.  The story revolves around a common scenario: the parents attend a dinner party while a teenage babysitter watches over their young children, but it resolutely resists conforming to any particular form of that scenario.  Instead, it provides many disordered potential, conflicting, and sometimes concordant  chains of events around that scenario.  There is not one story in “The Babysitter.” There are many, and they cannot be readily reconciled beyond their basic connections in the names of the characters.

            The troubling and confusing ways in which these different chains intersect and contradict one another leads a reader to seek out another sort of logic.  The unifying logic of “The Babysitter” can be found in the desires expressed by each of stories.  Each presents a different sort of psychosexual fantasy.  Harry, the father, wishes to catch the young babysitter and her boyfriend, so that he can seductively “punish” her and recapture the sexuality of his youth.  Dolly, the mother, wishes to recapture her own sexuality and feelings of being desired in orgiastic intercourse with the party host, who in turn, wishes to seduce her away from her family.  The teenage boys, Mark and Jack, wish to have sex with the babysitter by any means available, including rape.  The babysitter and children exhibit their own psychosexual fantasies, though these are less explicitly sexual, presenting developing rather than developed desires.  The babysitter obsesses with penises.  Jack’s fantasies involve erotic and punishing spankings and confuse sexuality with embarrassment and uncontrolled urination.  Mitsi engages in relatively innocent tickling, wrestling and voyeurism.

            Some of these desires are in concordance, able to coexist, as when Harry is pleased to see his son Jack spank the babysitter’s exposed rear. But many more conflict with one another, as when the teenage boys believe they must kill the children to protect themselves.  Yet they all coexist within the boundaries of the short story.

            This theme of conflict and coexistence is given form by the motif of the television.  One or more characters attempt to watch an ever changing chain of television programs, western, mystery and romance, and try to form an understanding from the disjointed snippets they see. The reader is in the same position as the television viewer(s).  And both are perhaps engaged in a futile endeavor.