Essays on Ashtray

Abstract

Reality is a powerful source of inspiration for writers in the 20th century. For Raymond Carver the American reality of the working class served as the main source of inspiration for his short stories that fall into the dirty – realism literary style. A technique that is representative for this current and that Carver subtly masters in his short stories is the insertion of objects into the narration, attributing them the value of reflecting the reality through familiar descriptions of the working class American society’s lifestyle. In Carver’s narration the objects tell stories, unite people in the same universe ...

Advertisements pummel us from every angle in modern times. We no longer have to leave our homes to be the victims of aggressive billboards and magazine ads, imploring that we buy and notice. Now the advertisements show up in our mailboxes, on our doorsteps, in our television screens, and in our inboxes. There is no escaping advertising. The primary basis of advertising is the use of words, and how they affect us on a fundamentally psychological level. Words and phrases, sometimes simple and sometimes complex, have the power to change how we view a product. At times, it makes us want a ...

The sky was covered with black clouds, and it was raining heavily, as if the skies knew what awaited me that day. I was hardly seven years old, playing with a new set of toy airplanes that my father had bought for me. I had spread all my toys on the carpet in front of the fireplace. My father was sitting on a sofa near me with a cigarette in one hand and the television remote in the other. The clock chimed. It was mid-day. My father immediately remembered that it was time for him to take his medicine. He left his ...