What is Love? Does anyone really know the meaning of the word? Does it have a different meaning to different people? These are the questions that Carver’s four characters ponder over heavily flowing gin and deep conversation in the short story, “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love.” Carver characters discuss and debate the meaning of love throughout the story. I will explain what the different characters feel about love. The author shows there are different types of love and different levels of each type. He also proves that someone’s emotions for a person can change from love to hate and then back to love. The characters search for the true meaning of love throughout the story, and in the end, neither figure it out.
The story starts with the four friends sitting at a table having a few drinks before dinner. Mel McGinnis, his wife Terri, his best friend Nick, who is also the narrator of the story, and Nick’s wife Laura are the four characters. Even though Nick narrates the story, Mel, who is a cardiologist, seems to be the main character. The gin is flowing at the table and as Mel starts to feel his drink, he also starts pondering his feelings of love and hate.
Terri and Mel have been married for four years, and he begins to discuss Terri’s previous relationship. Before she married Mel, Terri lived with a man named Ed. Ed is a vital part of this story, even though he is dead at the time. Ed was abusive and at one time tried to kill Terri. Terri speaks of one experience in which Ed says as he is beating her, “I love you, I love you, you bitch” (Carver 726). Mel feels that Ed could have never loved Terri if he was so abusive and tried to kill her. He addresses Terri’s thoughts of Ed’s love by saying, “My God, don’t be s...
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...mmit suicide, Terri felt she needed to be there for him in the hospital. She loved and cared enough about him to sit by his side while he was dying.
So what is the true meaning of love? I have explained how Carver used his characters to show the different ways that people view love. He has shown that there are different types of love and different levels of each type. He also shows two examples of how feelings that someone has for a person either love or hate, can move from one extreme to the other. A person can move from love for someone to hate for that person and visa versa. The characters in the story pondered one of life’s greatest mysteries, the true meaning of love. Although they never actually figured out the true meaning, I feel that after the night of drinking gin at that table in Albuquerque, each of them understand love and all its quirks a little better.
The characters Ed and Emily are both disturbed people who cannot bear to lose the person they love. In conclusion to losing their loved ones they decide upon murder, although Ed does not kill his ex Terri he does threaten to do so. Emily murders her lover to keep him from ever leaving her side. Ed threatens to kill his ex in order to scare her into staying, but when that does not work he kills himself, not being able to live without her. Both characters show signs of possibly having mental illness or just simply being unstable. One example of this is in “A Rose For Emily”, in paragraphs 26-28 it talk about how Emily would not let the town’s people bury her father. It says, “She told them that her father was not dead” (406). Emily was clearly not capable of dealing with the death of her father, she did not want to let him go. Another example of how the characters display being unstable is in, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”. In this short story is says, “Terri said the man she lived with before Mel loved her so much he tried to kill her. Then Terri said, ‘He beat me up one night. He dragged me around the living room by my ankles. He kept saying, ‘I love you, I love you, you bitch’” (411) The characters from both of the short stories showed signs of how they were incapable of dealing with
...imately failing to do so. Maybe there is a gem that you hold up as a standard for what you are looking for. Carver never describes self love, maybe it is left out because that is the elusive love the Mel McGinnis is struggling to find and in this story at least fails to find. Finding only self hate instead. The last two sentences suggest this story could be about anyone including yourself. “I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone’s heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.” “What creates tension in a piece of fiction is partly the way the concrete words are linked together to make up the visible action of the story. But it's also the things that are left out, that are implied, the landscape just under the smooth (but sometimes broken and unsettled) surface of things.: (ShopTalk)
Weele, Michael Vander. "Raymond Carver and the language of Desire." Short Story Criticism. Ed. Thomas Volteler. Detroit: Gale Publishing Inc., 1989. 36-41.
In order to develop a real understanding of Raymond Carver’s text, the complex relationship between the father and the daughter must first be understood. The relationship between the girl and her father is the foundation of the entire story, and the ending cannot possibly be understood without a full recognition of how they interact. It is evident that there has been a vast change between the father when he was younger and when he was older with his daughter. Throughout the story that h...
The characters in Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We talk About Love are all part of the submerged population group. There are no heroes in Carver’s stories like in the Lais of Marie de France, no grand adventure or crime as in Shakespeare’s Othello or Stendhal’s The Red and The Black, but a submerged group of imperfect people drunk and hungover watching their life fall apart to ruins from right underneath them. Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents uses an analogy about the ruins of the ancient city of Rome to explain the layers of the psyche. The ruins of an ancient city allow a person to see the history and structure of the past, much like the mind which is composed of the ruins of shattered ideas and memories of childhood that we were unaware of at the time. The new is built on top of the old, creating stratified layers of history and memories, that one day may be pieced together to give a bigger picture despite the holes left in the ruins. “Except for a few gaps, he will see the wall of Aurelian almost unchanged.” (Freud 31). Much like the ruins of Rome, Carver’s characters live in the ruins of their crumbling life. The characters in Carver’s short stories, the submerged population, are slowly being covered with like the ruins of Rome.
Love has many definitions and can be interpreted in many different ways. William Maxwell demonstrates this in his story “Love”. Maxwell opens up his story with a positive outlook on “Love” by saying, “Miss Vera Brown, she wrote on the blackboard, letter by letter in flawlessly oval palmer method. Our teacher for fifth grade. The name might as well have been graven in stone” (1). By the end of the story, the students “love” for their teachers no longer has a positive meaning, because of a turn in events that leads to a tragic ending. One could claim that throughout the story, Maxwell uses short descriptive sentences with added details that foreshadow the tragic ending.
Terri, Mel's wife, was once married to an abusive man, who '...went on dragging me (Terri) around the living room. My head kept knocking on things.... What do you do with love like that?.... People are different, Mel. Sure, sometimes he may have acted crazy. Okay. But he loved me. In his own way maybe, but he loved me.'; (pp 110-111) To the reader, it seems hard to believe that there could be love in a relationship where one partner physically abuses the other. However, in Terri's case, both Terri and her ex-husband felt that they were in love. This coincides with the author's theme that early on in a r...
What is love? Love could be considered a philosophical field, due to its complexity. The desire to be loved is universal, affection can be displayed in various forms; some shower with beautiful lavish gifts while others choose a more humble romantic approach. Irrespective of the approach the desire to love and be loved is an essential component of being human and is often a driving force in an individual’s actions. In the movie Forrest Gump, love is the factor that motivates the majority of the characters. While being a very simple character; Forrest’s actions, much like Frankenstein’s monster, are driven by love and the need to explore the world around him. When Forrest fulfills his role as a...
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. It is a story that explores all
illustrated through looking at the parallels of the intertwined relationships between three separate individuals. Miss Amelia Evans, Cousin Lymon Willis, and Marvin Macy, are the players involved in this grotesque love triangle. The feelings they respectively have for each other are what drives the story, and are significant enough that the prosperity of entire town hinges upon them.
After analyzing Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” it is easy to see that there are several different ideas concerning true love that the characters in the story are in dispute over. Terri’s idea of real love is the most valid out of the group at the table. All of the members of the group are rather confused as to what real love is. Terri is included as one of the confused. However, I believe that she is the closest to understanding what love is. A key piece of evidence demonstrating her understanding of love is her remark to Laura and Nick. She scolds the couple for basing their relationship on physical aspects, rather than emotion or passion. Terri, like the rest of the party, is on her second marriage. Her first husband was an abusive man that beat her, and even dragged her by her ankles around their living room. Terri’s current husband, Mel, is a cardiologist that believes in spiritual love, and that between spouses, people are barren and hollow inside, and that he could be married to any other empty person without difference. Mel is rather shielded from emotion between spouses. His only real love lies with his children, unfortunately Mel allows his conflict with his ex wife to block him from calling his them. Terri does love Mel, but she reminisces about her time with Ed. Terri realizes that Ed was full of emotion, and that he was just befuddled and chaotic in his methods of sharing his feelings....
After a more detailed examination of the stories, however, it becomes evident that each individual is striving to find love. Though love is a universal goal, each person's criteria for a meaningful, fulfilling and loving relationship varies. This is clearly demonstrated by the different situations in which the characters find themselves. The conventional, stereotypical, and almost cliché demonstration of love can be seen in stories A & D, where the characters simply "fall in love and get married".
Raymond Carver uses strategic dialogue and point of view to articulate themes in his short stories. Another tactic Carver uses in his writing is analyzing basic human skills such as the ability to define love through intimate relations between characters that reveal deeper meaning. In the short stories “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” and “Cathedral,” he investigates relationships and how the characters develop the true meaning of love. While reading these two short stories the reader is able to comprehend the similarities that draw Carver’s works together. Through these stories the reader is also able to understand his outlook on love and human kinship. Carver uses certain strategies and techniques that allow him to bring a parallel between his different stories, but there are also definite things that set each story apart.
Carver tells the story mainly through what happens in the story, rather than through the narrator’s perspective or the characters’ emotion and personalities. He connects all the events in the story in a logical way by using the elements rising action and climax. Therefore, he drew the reader 's’ attention and raise their curiosity toward what would happen next in the story. At the end, Carver finishes the story with an open ending which is a great way to end the story when the characters are not fully described in both emotion and personality. Therefore, the readers couldn’t predict what the characters would do to solve the conflict. By ending the story with an open ending, Carver allows the readers to create their own ending and satisfy with their own
Everybody has felt it at one time or another, whether it is for a person, everyday objects, or your pet. Love is an important symbol that has traveled through generations and still exists in today’s society. Love is a common word used to describe one’s affection towards people that we care about in our lives. In Will Weaver’s short story “A Gravestone Made of Wheat” love is found between a man and a woman who lived on a small farm in Minnesota. Olaf Torvik and Inge Altenburg fall in love with each other during their strenuous attempt to get married.