“Love Gone Wrong:” A Thematic Analysis of Raymond Carver’s Selected Short Stories

Shahzad YazdanpanahPyeaam Abbasi,University of Isfahan

AbstractFrom the very beginning, Raymond Carver’s short stories were the best representatives of the emergence of minimalism in literature, especially in the genre of short story. Considering Carver as a minimalist-realist writer, the present study aims to examine obsessions or themes that are common in Carver’s short stories and are presented in an indirect way through his minimalist style of writing. For this purpose, the stories are mostly analyzed with the thematic focus on the concepts of responsibility, communication, marriage, love, and family. This article, then, attempts to show the significance of the values and obsessions that Carver presents under the surface of his minimalist writings, especially through depicting the outcome of their absence in his characters’ lives. Consequently, this article seeks to argue that Carver’s minimalist style, the obsessions he imposes under the surface of his writings, and the various interpretations behind them are not only confusing, but also the best way of exploring such concepts as communication and responsibility that are necessary for any kind of relationship. In fact, the significance of this article lies in the examination of Carver’s implicit emphasis on the importance of communication for the permanence of love and relationships through the unwritten sentences of his short stories.

Keywords: Raymond Clevie Carver, Minimalism, Love, Communication, Irresponsibility.

IntroductionRaymond Clevie Carver born on 25 May 1983 in Clatskanie, Oregon is a prominent American short story writer and poet who, through his minimalist style of writing, gave “voice to a submerged population, who before his time had not been adequately recognized in the cultural space of American literature” (Lainsbury 1). Carver had “concentrated his fictional efforts in the genre of the short story” (Meyer 25), therefore, he “had been given the lion’s share of credit for reviving the short story genre in the 1980s” (Plath vii). Indeed, as Carver himself said he concentrated on writing short stories because he “usually didn’t have the time, or the heart, to think about working on anything very lengthy” (Carver, 1984: 34). As an illustration, his first collection of short stories Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? was published in 1976 when Carver and his wife “had just been released from their debts by a federal bankruptcy court” (Sklenicka xi), and his “selection” of short stories Where I’m Calling From which was called “a favorite book of the late twentieth century” (xii) by the New York Times was published just before his death. Although Carver believed that he had “used his powers of fantasy to transform what he calls the ‘Deathly boring’ reality that surrounded him” (Tromp 79) most of his stories are the representation of his life experiences. In fact, as Carver said:

Most of what I write is about myself, even though I never write anything autobiographical. But I’m not a narcissistic writer, or no more so than any other writer. A writer writes about what he knows, and in most cases that’s himself. That’s why the stories I write have connections to the world I know, the world in which I live or have lived. They create a link between me and a world that is part real, part imagination. My imagination (ibid.).

Therefore, Raymond Carver attempted to combine his dark, sorrowful experiences such as poverty, addiction, and marriage breakup with his own imagination through his minimalistic, onion like structure of his short stories in order to create such stories each of which can be called a masterpiece. Most importantly, from the “very beginning” Carver was associated with “the literary movement known as ‘minimalism’”—a term which according to James Plath he “vehemently resisted” (17). The minimalist movement was a “response” (Monti 57) to the metafictional inclinations of the 1960s and 1970s, and literary minimalism is a style that reduces “language and narrative to the simplest yet most effective structure” (56). According to Herzinger, minimalist fiction is about “endurance, tracing the collision of the anarchic self and its inexplicable desires with the limitations imposed by life in the world, with special attention paid to that moment when the self confronts its limitations and decides to keep on going” (20). In his essay “A Few Words about Minimalism,” John Barth states that “a cardinal principle [of the minimalist aesthetic] is that artistic effect may be enhanced by a radical economy of artistic means, even where such parsimony compromises other values: completeness, for example, or richness or precision of statement” (1). Above all, although as Meyer declares “the fact of Carver’s membership in the minimalist fraternity has never been fully and firmly established” (31), Carver has been always considered as one of “the leaders of a new movement in short fiction” (Saltzman 4). Yet, what is mostly important in Carver’s minimalist stories is the meaning behind his texts that is conveyed to his readers through his use of minimalistic techniques and the lessons he tries to transfer to his readers by depicting a very slim slice of his characters’ sorrowful lives.

Thus, Carver’s short stories are mostly the representation of “failure of love to overcome the life-destroying forces of infidelity and alcohol” (Stull and Carroll 39), unfaithfulness and addiction caused by characters’ selfishness, irresponsibility, and lack of communication.

1

Therefore, Carver’s short stories are the representation of the “rural or suburban areas inhabited by battered middle-class people, often struggling among alcohol and familiar problems” (Monti 59) which is also known as “Carver Country” (ibid.). In fact, what is mostly common among “Carver Country” is his “circle of ‘unsatisfying marriage[s]’” (Bethea 90) as the result of characters’ alcoholism, irresponsibility and cruelty to each other, as well as communication incapabilities especially in his second major collection of stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981).

Indeed, the What We Talk About collection is one of the most prominent collections of Carver’s short stories that perfectly presents the minimalist techniques of his writing, as well as his major obsessions. As Meyer asserts, “the stories here are indeed shorter, on average, than those in Will You Please and Furious Seasons. They also have a more desolate outlook, which is amplified by their astringency of tone” (86). In other words, most of the stories of this collection contain alcohol, violence, cruelty, communication failures, broken marriages, and “the speaking silences” (Stull and Carroll 39) with “ambiguous, indeterminate” (Bethea 7) endings. For that reason, the collection “has been nicknamed the ‘minimalist bible,’ and when readers and critics consider Carver a minimalist they generally have this volume in mind” (Meyer 87). Therefore, the What We Talk About collection can be called the collection of Carver’s darkest tales (Meyer 86), because its stories are portraits of “marriage[s] in the process of diminishing” (Nesset 12) while they are filled with alcoholic, irresponsible, indifferent characters who are cruel not only to themselves but also to others. As a matter of fact, most of Carver’s short stories are the depiction of “the major themes of […] alcoholism, poor communication, and the failure of relationships” (Bethea 126). Yet, as Carver himself clarified in his interview with Kasia Boddy, he preferred “to speak of [his] ‘obsessions,’” because he did not like “the word ‘theme’” (198). Also, as Carver declares, some of these obsessions are “the relationship between men and women, why we oftentimes lose the things we put the most value on, [and] the mismanagement of our own inner resources” (199). Moreover, there are some other obsessions or “things that count” (Applefield 207) in Carver’s stories such as “love, death, dreams, ambition, growing up, and coming to terms with your own and other people’s limitations” (Carver, 1992: 140).

For that reason, many of Carver’s stories like “Popular Mechanics,” in What We Talk About, and most of the stories in the Will You Please collection such as “Neighbors,” “They’re Not Your Husband,” “The Ducks,” “What Is It?,” “Signals,” “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?,” are all tales of “an encounter between two couples” (Meyer 125) or examination of “marital relationship at the point of dissolution” (65). Additionally, stories such as “Night School,” “Why Don’t You Dance?,” “A Serious Talk,” “One More Thing,” “Fever,” and “Intimacy,” are representations of characters’ lives after their marriage has been broken up. Yet, in Carver’s What We Talk About collection the very idea of love “takes full predominance, [and] figuring as the organizational device” (Nesset 9-10) more than in any other collections. In other words, the life of couples in the stories of this collection is filled with the absence of love and “the symptoms of love’s withdrawal” (12).

“Popular Mechanics”As an illustration, one of the best stories that is truly Carveresque and fits Carver’s minimalist techniques of writing and starts from the point where “the relationship turns ice cold” (Bethea 149) is the “super-short” (Barth 1) a two-page story of “Popular Mechanics” from Carver’s “most elliptical” (Nesset 45, Bethea 40) collection, What We Talk About. It is the story of two

2

arguments, first before the story begins and secondly over taking the child. In fact, although the story begins at the point which seems that the couple’s argument just has stopped, their argument over taking their child starts. Accordingly, in “Popular Mechanics” from the opening scene “we do know that the marital love is finished” (Meyer 114), because “from the opening sentences, the fact that [the couple] relationship has reached a breaking point becomes perfectly clear” (Meyer 92). Above all, the explanation of the weather’s turn at the very beginning “externalize[s] the relationship’s emotional state” (Bethea 217), therefore it seems that the couple’s marital relationship is in harmony with the turn and darkness of nature, since the same as the outside darkness their love and marital relationship, the future of the baby, and their familial condition gets dark through their own selfishness. Indeed, like the snow which is “melting into dirty water” (302), their love and affection melts, and their relationship is decayed (Bethea 97), while they slush by on the ruined remnants of their marital life just as the cars outside. For that reason, mostly in such stories the innocent children of the family are usually the victims of the lack of love between the parents just like the innocent baby in “Popular Mechanics” whose fate falls into ruin because of the parents’ lack of love, and irresponsibility not only for themselves, but also for the baby. For example, at the end before the baby slips out of the father’s hands “the kitchen window [gives] no light” (Carver, 2009: 303) which implies that there is no hope for the change of the situation, because of the parents’ not giving up the obstinate fight over having the child. Furthermore, according to Bethea, “the dirtiness of water prefigures the moral dirtiness of the tug-of-war, an evil further adumbrated by light imagery” (ibid.) of outside and inside darkness, and Bethea believes that “the descriptive detail [of] ‘little shoulder-high’ adumbrates where the infant is possibly torn apart” (ibid.) due to the parents’ irresponsibility, lack of communication and love. As a matter of fact, the absence of love, and injured marriages that Carver portrays in his stories stem from the couple’s lack of responsibility to each other, and consequently from their lack of communication. In fact, the characters’ selfishness and irresponsibility to each other has made them isolated individuals who cannot communicate with others easily, while as a result their life is “filled with anxiety, dread, and menace” (Meyer 68) instead of love. So, because the couple’s “inability to communicate” (Meyer 36) is present through the whole two pages of “Popular Mechanics” more than in any other Carver story, the readers do not confront any communication in this story and their first encounter with the characters starts from the point of mere noncommunication which continues to the end. He was in the bedroom pushing clothes into a suitcase when she came to the door.I’m glad you’re leaving! I’m glad you’re leaving! she said. Do you hear?He kept on putting his things into the suitcase (Carver, 2009: 302). More importantly, even if the characters start talking, because they cannot communicate, the “potential horror behind words” (Nesset 25) may harm them and worsen the situation. In addition, sometimes “it is too late for … anything to be said” (Meyer 45), therefore when they talk, “the words prove to be even more damaging than the silence has been” (ibid.). For instance, as long as the husband starts talking, the couple reach a crisis point in their married life which again emphasize their “communication problems” (Meyer 44). In fact, the father’s repetition of “I want the baby” (Carver, 2009: 302) against the woman and readers’ expectations after his early silence like the woman’s useless repetition of “I’m glad you’re leaving” (ibid.) proves his childish, irresponsible behavior while highlighting his communicational incapabilities. In

3

addition, as the woman tells him that he is “hurting the baby” (Carver, 2009: 303) his selfish, childlike stubbornness and irresponsibility does not let him think about the baby. Indeed, the words that the parents utter not only make the situation darker, but also does not let them decide reasonably, so they try to defeat each other by selfishness and stubbornness, also by abusing their child as a means for conquering the other, the same as the “biblical story” (Bethea 97) of Solomon’s knowing judgment about the child and the two women’s claim to be its mother (Sammarcelli 235). Although in the “biblical reference” (ibid.) the real mother does not accept her child to be cut into two parts by a sword, and is ready to offer her child to the other woman to save its life, the parents in “Popular Mechanics” are “so caught up in [their] desire[s] to have the baby that [they cause the baby’s] grievous harm” (Runyon 130). Therefore, like the false mother who did not care about the child’s life, the real parents are “impervious to their child’s suffering and go on fighting to keep the child at all costs” (Sammarcelli 235). Thus, the parents’ caring about their own selfishness more than their own child proves their irresponsibility and consequently their cruelty to their innocent baby which is seemingly easier to do rather than communicating with each other. Additionally, according to Bethea, the repetition of “I’m glad you’re leaving,” and “I want the baby” by the parents “serves to magnify the unreasonableness of the parents’ actions” (97). In fact, their actions and reactions, their selfishness, and their incapability of communication prove the parents’ unreasonable childlike behavior, as well as the loss of love not only for themselves but also for their child. More importantly, not only characters’ irresponsibilities result in their communicational problems, but also the characters’ communicational inabilities bring about characters’ selfishness, irresponsibility and cruelty to each other and the baby. Hence, such a continuum results in the characters’ lack of sympathy and mutual understanding, for when there is no true communication, there will be no understanding or listening to the other’s desires and wishes. So, a gap crops up in the couple’s relationship which results in the dominance of the absence of communication between them that consequently causes marital dissolution. In fact, according to Bethea, “poor communication [is] an important cause in the breakup of [the couples’] marriage” (179). This is why from the very beginning “Popular Mechanics” presents a depiction of a “broken down” communication and a “relationship [that] is in jeopardy” (Meyer 47). Indeed, no fruitful dialogue happens between the husband and wife through the story, even a silent dialogue does not take place between them and no “single vital verbal interchange” (Nesset 14) occurs through the story. Hence, due to this difficulty with communication, “the tension between [the couple] continue[s] to rise” (Meyer 126) especially because the couple “deal with their marital problem” and their communication inabilities not “by finesse, but by force” (German and Bedell 258-59). So, because the parents cannot talk without fighting, and their “discussion threatens to turn violent” (Runyon 128), they only hear what the other says, but they never listen, thus when the wife asks the man “Do you hear?” she implies that not only the man, but also the woman herself cannot listen; consequently, their unfruitful “verbal fight soon turns into a physical one” (Sammarcelli 232), and as a result they cannot communicate with each other. Accordingly, the title of the story, ‘popular mechanics’ can refer to the characters’ substitution of fighting for communication, since as long as characters cannot communicate with each other, they apply the popular mechanics of substituting their childlike, unreasonable, selfish, irresponsible behavior for their incapability of communication like “do-it-yourselfers [who] might fix their cars” (German and Bedell 258-59) not with a true strategy and expertly, but by violence and lack of skill.

4

Moreover, although Carver’s extreme minimalism in “Popular Mechanics” does not elaborate the cause of the couple’s disagreement, their irresponsible behavior toward the baby and extreme lack of communication clearly demonstrate that “communication problems are endemic to failing relationships” (Meyer 44). Therefore, Carver portrays lack of communication in this couple’s life not only by their unfruitful utterances, but also by the use of fragmented sentences, paragraphs and “by paring down all unnecessary details” (Sammarcelli 235):

I want the baby, he said.Are you crazy?No, but I want the baby. I’ll get someone to come by for his things.You’re not touching this baby, she said.The baby had begun to cry and she uncovered the blanket from around his head.Oh, oh, she said, looking at the baby.He moved toward her.For God’s sake! she said. She took a step back into the kitchen.I want the baby.Get out of here!” (Carver, 2009: 302).

Indeed, rather than “emphasizing [the characters’] communication problems” (Meyer 119) and the marriage breakup as its result, the text’s fragmentations and “ellipses” (Bethea 97) combined with its “bare, abstract quality, its faceless people” (Amir 192), as well as “unnamed and undescribed parents separating for unmentioned reasons and harming their unnamed … child” (Bethea 96) are applied for highlighting the melancholic and gloomy atmosphere of the story that is caused by selfish, irresponsible and cruel parents whose only way of communication is through fighting. Accordingly, “Popular Mechanics” perfectly represents “minimalisms of unit, form and scale [because of its] short words, short sentences and paragraphs” (Barth 1). In fact, the sudden, “highly condensed” (Sammarcelli 232) ending of the story with a “shift to the passive voice” (Bethea 97) of the last line: “in this manner, the issue was decided” (Carver, 2009: 303), keeps readers in a state of uncertainty and ambiguity, because the issue which is decided upon can refer to the baby’s fate or the parents’ fighting (qtd. in Bethea 97). Indeed, it is not clear whether the baby is alive or dead, and the parents’ reactions and condition after this incident “forever [remains] uncertain” (ibid.) through Carver’s excessive minimalism. In addition, the sudden shift to the vague and unclear conclusion does not let readers know if the child is alive or not or if “the parents maintain any contact after their fight” (Bethea 97) and communicate or they reach another violent climax in their fighting. Therefore, “the meaning of the last line can never be decided, or ‘de-sided’” (qtd. in Bethea 97), because of the baby’s unclear status. On the whole, Carver’s “experiments with contextual effects, both in descriptions and dialogues, and his reluctant narrators frustrate readers’ expectations by leaving major information out” (Sammarcelli 240), and does not provide answers for readers’ questions, since it is a “commentary from an omniscient narrator” (Bethea 261). Hence, the readers will never be able to understand what happens next, thus “the meaning of the story or what happens in it can never be known” (qtd. in Bethea 97). Therefore, “it is … up to the reader to imagine the resolution of the crisis” (Sammarcelli 241), to decide whether the child is alive or not or what will be the parents’ reactions to this incident. In sum, like many other Carverian stories, “Popular Mechanics” takes place in an indoor setting and starts from the everyday, trivial setting of a bedroom and ends in another routine, usual indoor place, the kitchen. Moreover, by “focusing on a couple at the moment they are breaking up [and] the dissolution of their relationship [because of] too little communication” (Meyer

5

118) the short story of “Popular Mechanics” is “a typical Carver story” (ibid.). Also, like “The Bath” or “A Small Good Thing” which “involve death or the threat of death” (Bethea 122), the short story “Popular Mechanics” is the representation of the possible death of a baby, whereas the former dies because of a driver’s irresponsibility, the latter dies due to his parents’ selfishness, irresponsibility, lack of love, and lack of communication. In other words, the victim of the parents’ “poor marriage” (Bethea 277), their “loveless stasis” (217), selfishness, irresponsibility and communicative inabilities is their innocent baby. Thus, a short story like “Popular Mechanics” attempts to portray the parents’ complete communicational disability which can result in their complete disregard of their child for whose safety and life they are totally responsible. Hence, by depiction of the couples’ lack of love not only to themselves but also to their baby as a cause of lack of communication, “Popular Mechanics” can be considered as one of the best examples of Carver’s minimalist style of writing with its ethical and moral concerns at the bottom. In fact, no matter how realistic or “incredible” (Bethea 96) the story is, it is a truly skillful representation of the impact of the parents’ actions on children’s future. Indeed, Although Carver may have gone to extremes (Simpson and Buzbee 44) for the depiction of such impacts, the communication failures, irresponsibility and selfishness of some parents in real life, as well as their marital serious problems are so great that even the story can be considered as a realistic one. In fact, the baby in “Popular Mechanics” can stand for any valuable possession, whether worldly or spiritual that men are incapable of appreciating due to their incapabilities and selfishness.

“One More Thing”In relation to the short story “Popular Mechanics” in which love becomes “a darkly unknowable and irreversible force” (Nesset 10), and a father abuses his child (Bethea 122), stands the last story in the What We Talk About collection, “One More Thing” that is “another brilliant depiction of love gone wrong” (Meyer 113). The story represents a father’s mistreatment of his daughter and it is a depiction of a “dysfunctional family” (Bethea 227) in which respect and love have given their place to disrespect and cruelty. In other words, in the same way that in “Popular Mechanics” the readers face the decline of love and parental responsibilities because of the parents’ childish behavior, in “One More Thing” the readers witness “the demise of love [and paternal responsibilities] because of alcoholism” (Bethea 219). More importantly, “One More Thing” perfectly represents “several of the obsessions that have run through [the What We Talk About] collection [such as] the difficulty of sustaining relationships, the effect of alcoholism as a contributing factor to that difficulty, [and] the problem of communication” (Meyer 109). Therefore, in “One More Thing” the readers are confronted with an alcoholic father, L.D., who is severely in need of communicating with his wife and daughter, but is incapable of fulfilling it. In fact, “the titular act of communication fails to be effected [in this story and] the protagonist is left stranded and needing desperately to communicate, but being entirely unable to do so” (112) which result in the disappearance of love in his marital and paternal life. Accordingly, the first paragraph of the story starts with an argument which truly introduces L.D. as an irresponsible father who cannot communicate not only with his fifteen-year-old “truant” (Bethea 126) daughter, Rae, but also with his wife Maxine who is the family manager and carries on the parental responsibilities that L.D. probably was not able to do. Further, L.D.’s inadequacy of communicating with others is overemphasized as he throws the jar on the table

6

“through the kitchen window” (Carver, 2009: 324) when Maxine tells him “I want you out of here. Tonight. This minute. Now. Get the hell out of here right now” (ibid.). However, because from the very beginning L.D. has proved to be verbally handicapped (Nesset 67), such a violent reaction can be considered as a communicational strategy for him, because after he throws the jar he can “feel air from the hole in the window on his face” (Carver, 2009: 324), which implies the “liberating and cathartic” (Bethea 126-27) aspects of his reaction, since “although hardly constructive, at least [he] did something” (126) that leads him “to a deeper emotional response” (Bellamy 36). In fact, L.D. applies insulting and violent reactions as a way of uttering his words, yet even such an “attempt at communication” (Meyer 45) fails. Indeed, although L.D. substitutes violence for his communication problems, his strategy fails and consequently leaves him isolated and more incapable of presenting his love or accepting his inability. Additionally, the hole that is created on the window implies the hole that is created in his married life, and his family’s love for him because of his lack of communicational potency and violence. Subsequently, through the whole story, especially through the repetition of “nuthouse” (Carver, 2009: 324, 325) and his happiness because of leaving this nuthouse, the readers witness “a man’s inability to accept his marriage’s end” (Bethea 99), and his unwillingness to leave his home and his family as well as his inability to find a proper way of mentioning it which reaches its climax at the end of the story “when words are called to account for being inadequate to the task of conveying intentions” (Saltzman 9) when he says “‘I just want to say one more thing’” (Carver, 2009: 326), but he cannot “think what it could possibly be” (ibid.). In fact, because of Carver’s “overt concern with the limitations of language” (Herzinger 12), many of Carver’s characters are captives of communication failures, insufficiency of language and the forced silence that is followed, for they want to say something more, but they are not able to say due to their inabilities to communicate with others. Indeed, mostly, characters like L.D. need “to say something, but [they find] it very difficult to do so” (Meyer 45), and as soon as they wish to “communicate with someone [they] find [themselves] without words” (Campbell 9). For that reason, “One More Thing” is a good depiction of “the failure of human dialogue” (Facknitz 288) in which L.D. is another victim of lack of communicational potentiality who is not able to “recognize … the cold facts of” (Nesset 79) his inability which results in his addiction to alcohol and the breakup of his marriage. Therefore, once again in “One More Thing”, “the lack of communication between husband and wife has created the rift whose end result Carver presents” (Meyer 112). In fact, although Carver does not provide the readers with the “underlying causes” (Bethea 150) of L.D.’s addiction to alcohol, it seems that his inability to establish any effective contact with his wife and then with his daughter could possibly be one of the reasons of his drinking which conversely results in the greater inability to communicate with them, and leads, consequently, to the fading of their love for him, and then collapse of his marriage. In fact, in Carver’s stories “the individual failures of characters (their ailing and broken marriages in particular) are recapitulated in the individual failures of their tongues” (Nesset 11). So, L.D.’s addiction can be considered “both [as] a reaction to [his tongue’s failure] and the cause of his failing marriage” (57). In sum, Carver’s “simple diction [and] clear syntax” (Bethea 261) combined with his “[o]pen, discontinuous [structure]” (Hassan, 1975: 58) represents the power of language and words (Sammarcelli 231) as well as alcohol in “One More Thing.” Indeed, what is left unsaid at the end of the story not only portrays the consequences of following “this-worldly pleasures” (Berry 168) such as alcoholism and the ensuing irresponsibility, but also “the limitations of

7

language” (Herzinger 12). In fact, through L.D.’s inability to “put [his intentions] into words” (Sammarcelli 231), Carver “investigates the nature, the limits, and the possibilities of language” (227) in this story. Thus the title of the story, at the end, creates a sense of uncertainty that is in return created by L.D.’s lack of communicational abilities and the “paucity of narrative” (Nesset 4). As a matter of fact, through the minimalist ending of “One More Thing” Carver highlights the immense “power of the unsaid in order to create a sense of mystery and unease” (Sammarcelli 239). So, at the end of the story the readers are astonished by what the man did not say and consequently caused them never to know what it “was in his head [that] is left unsaid” (Runyon 135). Indeed, such a “drastic” cut at the end of the story does not allow readers to get a “clear idea” (ibid.) of what the man intended to say. Thus, the title, ‘one more thing,’ emphasizes not only L.D.’s but also many of Carver’s characters’ communication failures and its unescapable results. Moreover, because what the man wants to say forever remains “a riddle” (Sammarcelli 240), one more thing that L.D. cannot say may refer to his unuttered love for Maxine and Rae that the “old Naugahyde suitcase with a broken clasp” (Carver, 2009: 324) has reminded him of their old good days now shattered just like its broken clasp. Additionally, one more thing can be L.D.’s asking for Maxine’s love which has probably faded because of his addiction and irresponsibility which has “given [her] plenty to remember [him] by” (ibid.). In sum, “One More Thing” perfectly represents how Carver’s “trademark endings … can lead to several interpretations” (Meyer 34). So, it can be said to be an “example of Carver’s minimalism at its most effective” (149) in which the readers must carry the burden of guessing what the man probably wanted to say, because one more thing that L.D. wants to say but cannot, can have different interpretations due to Carver’s minimalist style of writing. Indeed, because “[fragmentation] is constant with Carver’s aesthetics” (Sammarcelli 227), his stories “end on suspended actions or unexpressed feelings” (241). So, like “Popular Mechanics” where it is not clear whether the boy is dead or alive, what L.D. tries to utter never will be clarified, hence the story “end[s] in anticlimax, with major conflicts unresolved” (Stull and Carroll 40). Moreover, through minimalism in “One More Thing,” Raymond Carver portrays the consequences of insufficient or false communication such as violence or isolation, because there are even many more things for people in real life that would have changed their lives if they were uttered. For example, if L.D. was able to communicate with his wife and daughter when they still loved him, he would not become an addicted, violent, irresponsible, and homeless figure incapable of supporting and protecting his family even from himself. Indeed, choosing a correct way of communicating with his wife and daughter was one of his responsibilities that if he could understand, his life would have changed and would not have exposed him to loneliness. So, whatever more things that characters carry in mind-but cannot communicate-makes them lonelier. That is why there can be found many characters in Carver’s stories for whom “[m]arriage is lonelier than solitude” (qtd. in Bethea 217). Indeed, it is not marriage that makes them lonely, yet, it is their “verbal failure[s]” (Nesset 22) and irresponsibilities that cause the failure of their marriages. However, characters like L.D. are unable to perceive that they are the source of their failures not their wife or children. In fact, whatever exists in L.D.’s mind and rules it, is the real reason of his misery. On the whole, “One More Thing” is “another story of a doomed relationship” (Kennedy 206) which is caused by L.D.’s irresponsibility, addiction and lack of communication. In fact, L.D. is “in many ways a worthless drunk who brings nothing to the family and takes much away

8

from it” (Meyer 112); a person who instead of “alleviat[ing] the pain and suffering of” (Filipovic 71) his family adds more problems to their tragic life. Indeed, his incapability of communicating with his family has changed him to an irresponsible, “unemployed, belligerent husband, who ignites at the slightest provocation” (Saltzman 120), while is incapable of presenting his love to his wife and his daughter and conversely to receive their love.

“Everything Stuck to Him” and “Distance”“Everything Stuck to Him” is a story that appeared three times in Carver’s short story collections, twice “under the title ‘Distance’ in Furious Seasons and later in Fires” (Bethea 123) or what Stull and Carroll edited as Beginners which is the “manuscript version” of What We Talk About (Carver, 2009: xiii) short stories in Collected Stories, and once, in the What We Talk About collection under the title of “Everything Stuck to Him.” Accordingly, the short story “Distance,” that I am going to talk about has been chosen from Beginners which was published in Collected Stories. As a matter of fact, in comparison to many of Carver’s short stories, “Everything Stuck to Him” is the depiction of a couple’s reunion after fighting and a greater responsibility to their child. In fact, like in “Popular Mechanics,” in “Everything Stuck to Him” and “Distance,” the readers are confronted with a couple fighting over their child, yet these two stories do not end with the baby’s injury or death, and end “much more happily” (Runyon 129), because the father can perceive his responsibility to his family, and “foregoes [his] pleasure for the sake of his baby” (130) and his wife. In addition, like in “One More Thing,” in “Distance,” and “Everything Stuck to Him” readers witness a father-daughter relation, yet the father in these stories can communicate with his daughter, and is more respectful to her than L.D. in “One More Thing” who insults his daughter and cannot have a good contact with her. In fact, the very first explanation about the girl especially in “Distance” proves the father and daughter relation: “[s]he is a cool, slim, attractive girl. The father is proud of her, pleased and grateful she has passed safely through her adolescence into young womanhood” (Carver, 2009: 917); also, in “Everything Stuck to Him” she is explained as “a survivor from top to bottom” (304) in contrast to her parents that through “Everything Stuck to Him,” and “Distance” are “repeatedly called” (Bethea 123) as “the boy” and “the girl” (Carver, 2009: 304-309, 917-25) in order to lay emphasis on their childhood decision for marriage when they were still children themselves, as well as “exemplify[ing] the Carver motif of teenagers madly in love” (Bethea 123) who fail to bear life’s responsibilities due to their prompt decisions, and consequently will not survive. Indeed, “Everything Stuck to Him” is “a story within a story” (Bethea 123, Saltzman 81); a story of a young girl who wishes to know how her parents’ relationship was when she was a baby, and the father’s tale of a memory before the marriage has “fallen-apart” (Nesset 54) which is the story of a young couple who married soon and “not all that long afterwards they had a daughter” (Carver, 2009: 304). The father’s story conveys the baby’s insomnia and crying on the night he decides to go hunting with his father’s friend and the mother’s insistence that the father should stay and not leave because she does not “want to be left alone with [the baby] like this” (307). Although the father leaves, to the readers’ astonishment he comes back after a while and joins his family when the readers witness an exceptional scene in Carver’s writing career that a couple can communicate and apologize for what they have done earlier, and laugh afterwards, what Bethea calls as a “rarity” (123) in Carver’s fiction. More importantly, although the father finishes his story without explaining what has happened later that separated the couple, the very beginning of the story informs the readers that this

9

happiness did not last long, and their fate was probably similar to many other Carverian characters who has been separated for unknown reasons. Also, the girl’s insistence on knowing “what it was like when she was a kid” (Carver, 2009: 304) informs the readers that the marriage has “fallen-apart” (Nesset 54) and the parents had been separated when she was still a kid. Moreover, the boy’s love for his sisters-in-law, Sally and Betsy, and his habitual utterance that “if [they] weren’t married, [he] could go for Sally” (Carver, 2009: 305) foreshadow their presumptive separation because of “infidelity” which like communicational problems “manifests itself as one of many symptoms of ailing marriages and ailing selves” (Nesset 20). In addition, the names of the girl’s sisters in both versions and the boy’s hunting friend in “Distance” which stands in sharp contrast to the namelessness of the parents, highlights the threat for the couple’s teenage, early decided love. Additionally, the last paragraph of the story’s longer version, “Distance,” describes the couple’s unfaithfulness to each other as the cause of their separation. So, it seems that like many other Carverian stories characters’ lack of communication in “Everything Stuck to Him,” and “Distance” has resulted in their unfaithfulness, which such an intimacy in return results in more communicational incapabilities. Therefore, in these stories “flashbacks contribute to the text’s fragmentation and the reader’s disorientation with a shift of focus” (Sammarcelli 229), as well as contributing to “the instability of relationships” (Meyer 89) and “the couple’s failure to grow from their experience” (Bethea 166). Indeed, through telling a story “the [father] is remembering a moment at which he achieved a sense of stability, [yet,] he is doing so only to lament its subsequent loss” (Meyer 108). Therefore, like “Popular Mechanics,” and “One More Thing” both of the short stories, “Everything Stuck to Him,” and “Distance” present the “loveless progression [of characters] through life” (Bethea 217), as well as their confrontation “with the devastating and contradictory nature of love” (Nesset 25) in spite of their craziness in love. In fact, like “the snow that is falling steadily on [the tile rooftops]” (Carver, 2009: 305), lethargy and apathy fall on the vitality and freshness of the couple’s love. Thus, in the same way that the weather clarifies the couple’s condition in “Popular Mechanics,” the snowy weather in “Everything Stuck to Him,” and “Distance” intensifies “the sadness of [the father’s] present situation” (Meyer 128), because like “Popular Mechanics” in which the coldness in outside “had made its way, tragically, inside” (Runyon 130) the father’s present situation proves that the cold which “was outside, for a while” (Carver, 2009: 309) in “Everything Stuck to Him” is now inside forever, so his life is as cold as the weather outside. Also, just as everything outside that “froze” (926) in “Distance,” the man’s memory of their dancing and laughing in addition to those “‘good old days” that Saltzman considers as “a treacherous legacy whose primary effect is to highlight the failure to sustain the optimistic vision of their future” (80) has been frozen too. In fact, the father’s standing by the window and remembering those happy times of their youth “poignantly reinforces the protagonist’s loss while simultaneously intimating the icy detachment with which he views life” (Bethea 123), as well as his loneliness. Indeed, although Carver’s minimalist style does not let readers know how that closeness and love have changed to the present distance, probably like other Carver’s stories characters’ lack of communication and its ensuing infidelity has resulted in their isolation. In fact, through paring down “needless words and phrases” (Meyer 108) in “Everything Stuck to Him,” Raymond Carver could truly present “the rubble after love has been shattered” (Bethea 123) in the father’s life as well as his “inner conflict” (Fabre 127). Moreover, the father’s unwillingness to talk about the reason for their separation that is implied by Carver’s minimalist style of writing in both versions of the story not only depicts the

10

character’s inability to communicate, but also the father’s “understandable desire to avoid opening wounds” (Bethea 130). In fact, in order to escape the harmful effect of words, the father takes refuge in silence to escape the unpleasant realities of life, since “despite relationships with other women, [he] is … condemned to loneliness” (Saltzman 82), the loneliness that was gradually created through his irresponsibility, and communication failures. For that reason, the shorter story’s title, everything stuck to him, can explicitly refer to “the breakfast plate [the father] knocks into his lap” which emphasizing “how everything—his wife and daughter especially—did not stick to him, but instead became marked by their distance” (108), and are far from him both spiritually and physically as his memories of the past twenty years. Furthermore, Bethea believes that “the title alluding to the farcical yet poignant image of the boy spilling his syrupy breakfast waffle, [and] leaving” (ibid.) whatever was stuck to his “woolen underwear and [throwing] it at the bathroom door” (Carver, 2009: 309, 925) implies the boy’s leaving his wife and his daughter behind and creating a gradual distance between himself and his family due to his short lasting love. Above all, the title of the longer version “Distance,” can be applied to many of Carver’s short stories in which the protagonist’s marital life is being destroyed or has been destroyed because of the couple’s selfishness, irresponsibilities, lack of communication, alcohol or adultery. In addition, distance can refer to the distance both the boy and the girl took from their responsibilities to their daughter and themselves by their infidelities or the distance they took from each other because of their communicational problems and its following infidelity which stand in sharp contrast to their intimacy twenty years earlier. In sum, “Everything Stuck to Him” and “Distance” present a boy and a girl who mistakenly think that they are in love; however, love actually means those types of qualities such as taking responsibilities, putting aside selfishness, true communication, and loyalty that they both lacked. Yet, like the couple in “Everything Stuck to Him” or “Distance,” most of Carvers’ characters have an illusion of love, but it is only a transitory dream, like the couple’s “ambitions” (Carver, 2009: 305, 918) that are never fulfilled (Saltzman 81) and even its memory cannot satisfy their “emotional needs” (Saltzman 80). Therefore, the father’s sentence portraying the couple’s stages of life, “the boy and girl, husband and wife, father and mother” (Carver, 2009: 304) illustrates that for the couple in “Everything Stuck to Him” and “Distance,” like many of Carver’s characters the word love “‘grows dark’ in their lives—as love begins to eat through them, and they find themselves either betraying or betrayed” (Nesset 10), so they are left “bewildered, enraged, diminished, suffocated, isolated, and entrapped by love” (ibid.), about which at the very beginning they were crazy (Carver, 2009: 304). On the whole, all these stories such as “Popular Mechanics,” “One More Thing,” “Everything Stuck to Him,” and “Distance,” portray “Carver’s concern with the fragility of interpersonal relationships” (Meyer 33) caused by their lack of communication and irresponsibilities. Therefore, all these stories, explicitly or implicitly, present “Carver’s lifelong obsession with communication” (Meyer 35). Indeed, characters’ communication failures conveyed through Carver’s minimalist style in combination with characters’ irresponsibilities and cruelty toward one another destroy their marriage and their familial life “to where silence and isolation dominate” (Bethea 149). Yet, most of the characters fail to realize that their life’s difficulties and loneliness originate from themselves, their own decisions and choices to be selfish and irresponsible when they fail to be open “to the other in spite of ” (Filipovic 65) themselves. In fact, characters “are alienated

11

[not] because of their bad marriages” (Bethea 93), but because of their own selfish choices which make them “ignore one another” (Meyer 92). Thus, when there is no attention to the other, the very idea of love loses its meaning and consequently confronts the readers with the fragility of love, hence Carver’s skepticism towards marriage in his short stories (Bethea 217); no matter how passionately the characters’ lives begin, their selfishness and irresponsibility, as well as their communicational incapabilities end each life with misery and ruin.

ConclusionThrough his onion like stories, Raymond Carver emphasizes his characters’ loss of values. Carver’s minimalist, open-ended stories have different layers that are open to different interpretations, and each layer has a new message behind it. Indeed, Raymond Carver is a writer who, through combining his minimalist style with dirty and harsh realities of life that he himself had experienced, attempts to portray the importance of values such as one’s responsibility to others, faithfulness, and the significance of communication and communicational abilities which are all veritably needed for the continuity of love. More importantly, although many critics criticized Carver for his short and lean style, no one can ignore his impact on the revival of American short story and the impact of his stories on the readers which invites them to a new and better understanding of life while encouraging them to be better people. For this purpose, Carver does not create extraordinary stories, but his real, simple diction and minimalistic style of writing make his stories extraordinary. In fact, Raymond Carver writes about “commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language … with immense, even startling power” (Carver, 1984: 15) which is created because of his implicit depiction of his characters’ irresponsibility and lack of communication. Carver represents the drastic effects of irresponsibility and the bitter realities that it creates through the representation of simple, real, ordinary words and events, while representing characters’ lack of communicational abilities through the stories’ short sentences, paragraphs, and application of gaps, fragmentations and silences. Accordingly, it should be mentioned that although Carver’s short stories are not that much long to provide readers with helpful information, they constitute inclusive meanings and obsessions. As a matter of fact, because Raymond Carver is “an instinctual writer rather than a writer working out a programme or finding stories to fit particular themes” (Boddy 199), his minimalist short stories can have different impacts on the readers. Carver’s open-ended stories let the readers and critics reconsider themes for the stories other than those Carver himself considered. According to Meyer, “critics have [also] offered alternative (and equally valid) lists of obsessions” (32) for Raymond Carver’s short stories. In fact, the absence of a conclusion at the end of most of Carver’s short stories provides this opportunity for the readers to deduce meaning from the unwritten lines of the stories. Therefore, although Carver did not “explicitly” (Meyer 32) mention lack of communication as his obsession, in most of his stories characters’ failures of marriages and interpersonal relationships stem from their communicational problems. For that reason, it is true and reasonable to assert that failure of communication is Carver’s prevalent theme, or quote Meyer who states that “Carver’s obsession with the importance and difficulty of communication resurfaces” (88) in many of his short stories especially in What We Talk About. In brief, through Carver’s stories the readers perfectly witness the characters’ personal dehumanization, and loneliness that originate from their own negligence to those types of values which define their own identities. Therefore, according to Jansen, Raymond Carver’s short

12

stories are worthy because they take “the measure of our loneliness [and morality] with greater precision than” (395) the works of “other contemporary writers” (Bethea 272), which subsequently make every reader “lament that he was not afforded the opportunity to produce more stories” (Meyer 148).

Works CitedAmir, Ayala. “Small Good Things: Symbols and Descriptive Details in Carver’s Short Fiction.” Critical Insights: Raymond Carver. Ed. James Plath. Amenia, NY: Salem P, 2013. 187-200. Print.Applefield, David. “Fiction & America: Raymond Carver.” Conversations with Raymond Carver. Eds. Marshall Bruce Gentry and William L. Stull. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1990. 204-13. Print.Barth, John. “A Few Words about Minimalism.” New York Times Book Review 28 Dec. 1986, late city final ed., 7: 1. NYTIMES. Web. 15 Jan. 2014.Barth, John. “A Few Words about Minimalism.” New York Times Book Review 28 Dec. 1986, late city final ed., 7: 1. NYTIMES. Web. 15 Jan. 2014.Bellamy, Joe David. “A Downpour of Literary Republicanism.” Mississippi Review 14.1/2 (1985): 31-39. JSTOR. Web. 23 Mar. 2015.Berry, Philippa. “Postmodernism and Post-religion.” The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism. Ed. Steven Connor. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 168-81. E-Book.Bethea, Arthur F. Technique and Sensibility in the Fiction and Poetry of Raymond Carver. New York: Routledge, 2001. Print.Boddy, Kasia. “A Conversation.” Conversations with Raymond Carver. Eds. Marshall Bruce Gentry and William L. Stull. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1990. 197-203. Print.Campbell, Ewing. Raymond Carver: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1992. Print.Carver, Raymond. Furious Seasons and Other Stories. Santa Barbara, California: Capra, 1977. Print.---. Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories. New York: Vintage, 1984. Print.---. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?. New York: Vintage, 1992. Print.---. No Heroics, Please: Uncollected Writings. New York: Vintage, 1992. Print.---. Raymond Carver: Collected Stories. Eds. William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll. New York: Lib. of America, 2009. Print.Fabre, Claire. “Feminist Perspectives on the Works of Raymond Carver.” Critical Insights: Raymond Carver. Ed. James Plath. Amenia, NY: Salem P, 2013. 124-37. Print.Facknitz, Mark A. R. “‘The Calm,’ ‘A Small, Good Thing,’ and ‘Cathedral’: Raymond Carver and the Rediscovery of Human Worth.” Studies in Short Fiction 23.3 (1986):

13

287-96.Filipovic, Zlatan. “Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas: ‘After you, sir!’” Moderna språk. 105.1 (2011): 58-73. Web. Available at: http://ojs.ub.gu.se/modernasprak article/view/667/618Gentry, Marshall Bruce, and William L. Stull, eds. Conversations with Raymond Carver. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1990. Print.German, Norman, and Jack Bedell. “Physical and social Laws in Ray Carver’s ‘Popular Mechanics.’” Critique 29.4 (1978): 257-60. Print.Hassan, Ihab. “POSTmodernISM: A Practical Bibliography.” Paracriticisms: Seven Speculations of the Times. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1975. 39-59. Print.---. Paracriticisms: Seven Speculations of the Time. Champaign: U of Illinois P, 1985. Print.Herzinger, Kim A.. “Introduction: On the New Fiction.” Mississippi Review 14.1/2 (1985): 7- 22. JSTOR. Web. 10 March. 2015.Jansen, Reamy. “Being Lonely—Dimensions of the Short Story.” Cross Currents 39.4 (1989- 90): 391-401. JSTOR. Web. 25 Oct. 2014.Kennedy, J. Gerald. “From Anderson’s Winesburg to Carver’s Cathedral: The Short Story Sequence and the Semblance of Community.” Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. 194- 215. Print.Lainsbury, G. P. The Carver Chronotope: Inside the Life-World of Raymond Carver’s Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2004. E-book.Meyer, Adam. Raymond Carver. New York: Twayne, 1995. Print.Monti, Enrico. “Minimalism, Dirty Realism, and Raymond Carver.” Critical Insights: Raymond Carver. Ed. James Plath. Amenia, NY: Salem P, 2013. 56-69. Print.Nesset, Kirk. The Stories of Raymond Carver: A Critical Study. Athens: Ohio UP, 1995. Print.Plath, James, ed. Introduction. Critical Insights: Raymond Carver. Amenia, NY: Salem P, 2013. Print.Runyon, Randolph Paul. Reading Raymond Carver. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1992. Print.Saltzman, Arthur M. Understanding Raymond Carver. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1988. Print.Sammarcelli, Francoise. “What’s Postmodern about Raymond Carver?.” Critical Insights: Raymond Carver. Ed. James Plath. Amenia, NY: Salem P, 2013. 226-43. Print.Simpson, Mona, and Lewis Buzbee. “Raymond Carver.” Conversations with Raymond Carver. Eds. Marshall Bruce Gentry and William L. Stull. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1990. 31-52. Print.Sklenicka, Carol. Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life. New York: Scribner, 2009. Print.Stull, William L. “Beyond Hopelessville: Another Side of Raymond Carver.” Philological Quarterly 64.1 (1985a): 1-15. Print.Stull, William L. “Raymond Carver.” Dictionary of Literary Biography: Yearbook, 1984. Ed. Jean W. Ross. Detroit: Gale, 1985. 233-45. Print.Stull, William L., and Maureen P. Carroll. “The Critical Reception of the Works of Raymond Carver.” Critical Insights: Raymond Carver. Ed. James Plath. Amenia, NY: Salem P, 2013. 39-55. Print.Tromp, Hansmaarten. “Any Good Writer Uses His Imagination to Convince the Reader.” Conversations with Raymond Carver. Eds. Marshall Bruce Gentry and William L. Stull.

14

Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1990. 72-83. Print.

15