Essays on Raymond Carver

Interpreting a text is a process in which one must take into account many details that the author provides or leaves out. Even though many believe that what the text actually says is what is most important, what one cannot actually find there is sometimes more important than what one does actually encounter. It is through this lens that Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” should be read, not through what is directly talked about, but what is not said. As its title states, a significant portion of the short story is dedicated ...

Raymond Carver lived between 1958 and 1988. In most cases, his contemporaries considered him as one of the forces that led to the revitalization of the American Short Story genre. He wrote the short story, Cathedral, which was published in 1993 (Peterson 167). Specifically, Cathedral examines and narrates the impact of a blind man in the lives of his friend and her husband. Superficially, Cathedral is a story about a disgruntled man whose meeting with his friend’s blind wife enables him to discover new ways of seeing. This paper examines and discusses the beliefs and values of the ...

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 ...

Not so long ago, I went to the book store and happened to pick up “The Best American Short Stories 1982” since I had always been a fan of John Gardner. I was excited to read the stories in the book, but I was surprised to learn that it contained short stories from several authors. The one that particularly stood out was Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral.” Carver had apparently been longing for critical acclaim for quite some time, which he received after his collection containing this story was published. Considering the remarkable characters, dialogue, plot, and the theme of Carver’ ...

People who have a duplicitous nature not only have a hard time making up their mind, but they also have a harder time avoiding temptation. They have not yet made up their mind about what type of person they want to be, and so when illicit opportunities come, they provide a stronger temptation than they do for people who are committed to ethical behavior. Connie has learned to sneak around as a result of her relationship with her parents, and this lack of ethical commitment makes her a vulnerable target for Arnold Friend. The only escape that Connie has from her mother comes when ...

Raymond Carver’s Cathedral has been referred to as “dirty fiction” and this is probably because of his engagement in profound theme. In his book, he tries to explore the rawness and baseness of the human condition (Amir 2010 p 27). The narrator who is a man of limited empathy and awareness breaks through such limitations and socializes with a blind man. The author brings to light the narrator’s actions and also his subsequent self-realization in the end. Raymond can arouse psychological dilemmas within the readers because of his skillful treatment of various issues. For example, while reading “Cathedral” the ...

In "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien and "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver, the short stories' respective characters deal with their masculinities, and its emotional consequences in a similar manner. There are also striking differences between their characters' portrayal of masculine behavior, as well as its consequences. In "The Things They Carried", the protagonist, platoon leader Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, is beset by romantic reveries of his girl back home. He often daydreams about a girl from the States Martha (who was his college classmate), during his platoon's missions in Vietnam. As a direct result of his daydreaming, one of the platoon's ...

Cathedral by Raymond Carver and A Good Man to Find, by Flannery O’Connor are both fictional stories. In many literary works, there are characters who symbolize how ignorant people are in the society. In a society, many people believe that they are good or perfect, yet inevitably, they have their flaws. In A Good Man to Find, by Flannery O’Connor, and the Cathedral, by Raymond Carver, the protagonists in the stories are enforced to deal with situations, which change their values and those of others. These stories talks of real life situations in the society. In the ...

‘Instructor’s Name’

What We Talk about When We Talk about Love’ ‘What We Talk about When We Talk about Love’, is a short story written by Raymond Carver in the year 1981. When this story was released, Carver was not well known in literary circles, and few would have guessed then that he would turn out to be the father of Literary Minimalism. As Monti opines, this story and the other sixteen stories in this collection, revived the realistic trend in short fiction, and their terse yet distinctive portrait of small town America, has come to be known as Carver’s ...

I have chosen to examine four short stories whose characters are people with physical markings or mental disorders. People who have these traits are unusual and regarded as odd by "normal" people. Usually, they develop some mental powers and become able to achieve much more than people who have neither physical nor mental problems. Maybe these "marked" people achieve success because they believe in themselves, whereas, "normal", healthy people tend to be paradoxically more self-conscious which hold them back. However, they are always there to judge the challenged ones. The stories that were particularly interesting to me are: Roman ...

"Robert Hayden"

The poem Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden tells about a hardworking foster father who does not get any appreciation from anyone. Robert Hayden was brought up in a poor family and he admired a foster father next door. Robert Hayden attended University of Michigan with H. Auden where he got much influence from Auden to continue writing. Robert also appreciated the work of other poets and his became his role models. Since Robert was black, most of his writings concentrated on race and he had lots of concern with racial expression. This particular poem was about a father who would wake ...

Coming of age and making the transition from child to man is one of the most difficult experiences a person ever lives through. One of the hardest elements about this is that it is the first major change. There is no former frame of reference to look back on. There is no concept that the smallest of errors will not have lifelong consequences. There also is no understanding of how thoughts, whether acted upon or not indirectly shape our actions. Araby by James Joyce and Nobody Said Anything by Raymond Carver both address that transition, and the attendant feelings ...

When it comes to the theme of acceptance, two pieces of literature, A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner, and Cathedral by Raymond Carver come to mind. One is set up in the Post-Civil-War-Southern-Town of the United States, while the other takes place more in a contemporary setting. In A Rose for Emily, it opens up with the death of an elderly woman that comes from a pre-Civil War family of wealthy aristocrats and in Cathedral, it opens up with the narrator telling the reader in a relaxed tone that a blind friend of his wife’s has decided to come pay them a ...

Introduction

This paper gives a critical analysis of the issues of social concern discussed by Raymond Carver in his articles: What We Talk About When We Talk about Love; Cathedral and Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? These are his works which he wrote at different times. What We Talk About When We Talk about Love is a collection of short stories written by Raymond Carver. The 176 page fiction which was published in 1981 consists of short stories including What We Talk About When We Talk About Love; The Bath; Everything Stuck to Him; Tell Me We Are Going; Why Don’ ...

Analysis of a Short Story

Analysis of a Short Story Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” is one of several stories that appears simple on first glance, but it’s actually complex and unique in many ways. Carver, who lived from 1938 to 1988, was famous for many of his works, including this one (New York Times, 2013). According to Geoffrey Wolff, Carver created narratives that are "brief . . . but by no means stark" (Poetry Foundation, 2013). Though known as an influential writer of American short stories, Carver was an alcoholic, whose wife, Maryann, and two children eventually left ...

The changing of perspectives of a primary character is often paramount to a story, and this story is told in a number of different ways. Raymond Carver's “Cathedral” is a small, intimate story, one which effectively revolves around two characters – the narrator, a regular average joe, and Robert, a blind man who is an acquaintance of the narrator’s wife. One fateful night, invited over for dinner, the narrator attempts to understand Robert and his way of life, as well as his relationship to his wife. In the process of this, he begins to understand things about himself, life, and Robert that he could not ...

"Cathedral" and Fences: Sight and Stubbornness Sight is a very prevalent theme in a great variety of fiction; it can often be a symbol for understanding, comprehension, and enlightenment. Hindsight and foresight are often rewarded as virtues, or at least play heavily into the plot of a story. A blind person is often thought to ‘see’, or comprehend, more than the normal person, and sometimes people are not aware of a shocking truth, despite it looking them straight in the face. These two scenarios are found in Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral" and August Wilson's play Fences, as both main characters are ...

Erich Fromm's Theory of Love in relation to Milan Kundera’s "The Hitchhiking Game" and Raymond Carver’s "What We Tall About When We Talk About Love" Love gets repeatedly confused with the thought of losing oneself to something, which gets deemed as being larger than life, greater than the self or total of one’s parts (Fromm 7). From the desire for human connection arises a desire of fusing with another person, so that the two can become one; to know each other as wholly and as deeply as one understands oneself. Therefore, this essay tends to look ...

Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral” is a small intimate story, one which effectively revolves around two characters – the narrator, a regular Average Joe, and Robert, a blind man who is a friend of the narrator’s wife. Sklenicka describes the narrator as “a typical bumbling, addictive character with a load of human stains; prejudices blunt-mindedness about his wife’s concerns and needs, a large appetite for food, drink, and marijuana” (372). One of the prejudices he expresses when his wife tells him that Robert’s wife was named Beulah. “Beulah! That’s a name for a colored woman. ‘Was his wife a Negro?’ I asked. ‘Are you crazy?’ ...

"Where I'm Calling From" - Raymond Carver

In Raymond Carver's short story "Where I'm Calling From," the effects of addiction on those who become addicted to them are illustrated in tragic and familiar detail. The unnamed protagonist is shown to have many of his problems come from addiction, whether it be to alcohol, to drugs, to sex and even emotional attachment; those around him also feel its effects in their own lives. The impact of addiction on the unnamed main character is shown to have tremendous difficulty shaking his addictions, which manifest themselves in several ways. The end of ...

INTRODUCTION

Sight is a very prevalent theme in a great variety of fiction; it can often be a symbol for understanding, comprehension, and enlightenment. Hindsight and foresight are often rewarded as virtues, or at least play heavily into the plot of a story. A blind person is often thought to ‘see’, or comprehend, more than the normal person, and sometimes people are not aware of a shocking truth, despite it looking them straight in the face. These two scenarios are found in the stories of Oedipus Rex by Sophocles and Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral.” In this essay, the use of sight in these ...