Raymond Carver is considered to be one of the most important American short story writers of all time. He utilized his work to reflect two distinct periods in his life. This first stage of his life depicts people in desperate situations, similar to his own experiences with poverty, alcoholism and divorce. Later in his work, during a time when he was given a second chance at love, it seems as though he is “reborn.” Carver is an author who experienced real hardships throughout his lifetime and used his literary work to depict his uncertain feelings about love. Raymond Carver uses the theme of love in “Gazebo”, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” and “Where I’m Calling From” to parallel the loss that he experienced, in his own marriage and career, due to alcoholism.
After having held numerous jobs while trying to balance the loss of his father, raising children since the age of 18, and his passion to write, Carver began drinking. He wrote Gazebo, a story in his collection “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” in 1981, before his divorce. The story depicts Holly and Duane, a married couple managing a motel. Once college sweethearts, they’re love begins to fade as Duane has an affair with Juanita, a maid at the motel. Duane was set on managing the motel, forcing Holly to give up her future. They rely on following each other to get through life; therefore, despite Holly’s doubtfulness in the rekindling of their love, Duane wants to continue an aimless life together despite his unfaithfulness. Holly makes efforts to rekindle their love by pouring whiskey on Duane’s stomach and licking it off but ultimately admits to herself that Duane is thinking about Juanita whenever they have sex. He begs for her forgiven...
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...nd love for himself and his life mirrored by the unnamed narrator in “Where I’m Calling From.”
Raymond Carver is considered to be one of the most important American short story writers of all time. He utilized his work to reflect two distinct periods in his life. This first stage of his life depicts people in desperate situations that he too faced: poverty, alcoholism and divorce. Later in his work, during a time when he was given a second chance at love, he is “reborn” and redeemed. Carver is an author who faced poverties throughout his lifetime and used his literary work to depict his feelings about love during these stages. Raymond Carver uses the theme of love in Gazebo”, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” and “Where I’m Calling From” to symbolize the common themes of love and loss that he experienced in his own marriages, works and alcoholism.
Carver tells the story in first person of a narrator married to his wife. Problems occur when she wants a friend of hers, an old blind man, to visit for a while because his wife has died. The narrator's wife used to work for the blind man in Seattle when the couple was financial insecure and needed extra money. The setting here is important, because Seattle is associated with rain, and rain symbolically represents a cleansing or change. This alludes to the drastic change in the narrator in the end of the story. The wife and blind man kept in touch over the years by sending each other tape recordings of their voices which the narrator refers it to being his wife's "chief means or recreation" (pg 581).
Throughout the lives of most people on the planet, there comes a time when there may be a loss of love, hope or remembrance in our lives. These troublesome times in our lives can be the hardest things we go through. Without love or hope, what is there to live for? Some see that the loss of hope and love means the end, these people being pessimistic, while others can see that even though they feel at a loss of love and hope that one day again they will feel love and have that sense of hope, these people are optimistic. These feelings that all of us had, have been around since the dawn of many. Throughout the centuries, the expression of these feelings has made their ways into literature, novels, plays, poems, and recently movies. The qualities of love, hope, and remembrance can be seen in Emily Bronte’s and Thomas Hardy’s poems of “Remembrance” “Darkling Thrush” and “Ah, Are you Digging on my Grave?”
The point of view from the narrators perspective, highlights how self-absorbed and narrow-minded he is. “They’d married, lived and worked together, slept together—had sex, sure—and then the blind man had to bury her. All this without his having ever seen what the goddamned woman looked like. It was beyond my understanding” (Carver...
Mel McGinnis of “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” seems like that one guy that everyone seems to know. He stands out from others; he’s unique. You either love him or hate him. Mel is very much like one of my good friends. They are both very individualistic and hey are both annoying drunks.
In the article “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”, which was written by Raymond Carver in 1981, the author is mainly talking about the story from Mel McGinnis, who is at home with his wife Terri and their friends, Nick and Laura, are drinking gin and tonics and talking about love.
The poem “Those Winter Sundays” displays a past relationship between a child and his father. Hayden makes use of past tense phrases such as “I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking” (6) to show the readers that the child is remembering certain events that took place in the past. Although the child’s father did not openly express his love towards him when he was growing up, the child now feels a great amount of guilt for never thanking his father for all the things he actually did for him and his family. This poem proves that love can come in more than one form, and it is not always a completely obvious act.
Gaitskill’s “Tiny, Smiling Daddy” focuses on the father and his downward spiral of feeling further disconnected with his family, especially his lesbian daughter, whose article on father-daughter relationships stands as the catalyst for the father’s realization that he’d wronged his daughter and destroyed their relationship. Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” focuses on Mel and his attempt to define, compare, and contrast romantic love, while leaving him drunk and confused as he was before. While both of my stories explore how afflicted love traumatizes the psyche and seem to agree that love poses the greatest dilemma in life, and at the same time that it’s the most valued prospect of life, the two stories differ in that frustrated familial love causes Gaitskill's protagonist to become understandable and consequently evokes sympathy from the reader, but on the other hand frustrated romantic love does nothing for Carver's Protagonist, except keep him disconnected from his wife and leaving him unchanged, remaining static as a character and overall unlikable. In comparing “Tiny, Smiling Daddy” and “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”, together they suggest that familial love is more important than romantic love, which we relentlessly strive to achieve often forgetting that we’ll forever feel alone without familial love, arguably the origin of love itself.
Love plays an important role in most physical and emotional relationships. Love is a word that can prove difficult to define or even compare to other emotions. This is due to the diversity of meaning and the complexity of the emotion itself. Everyone has been in love at least once before and has gotten a taste of all the good and bad things that come with it. Christina Rossetti’s “Song” presents some of the good parts of love while Philip Larkin’s “Talking in Bed” shows us some of the bad parts of love. Larkin’s poem presents a failing relationship where communication has failed between a couple and things are getting more and more difficult. Rossetti’s poem presents a wholly different view on love; it is told from the viewpoint of someone talking to his or her lover about what said lover should do after the speaker dies. The love between them seems better, more powerful and good. The two poems also present wholly different attitudes towards “The End,” whether that is the end of life or the end of the relationship. Larkin presents the end as something dark and sad, difficult to cope with. Rossetti, on the other hand, talks about the end as just another beginning, a chance to start over in a new world. Finally, the two poems represent remembrance in different ways. Larkin’s presents memory as something extremely important while Rossetti implies that it does not matter whether we remember or not.
In his story “What We Talk About When We talk About Love,” Raymond Carver expresses his idea of love through his characters and storyline. After reading this story, I am able to connect a type of love with each individual character in the story. Love is taken and given in many different ways, such as affection, gifts, affirmation, or physical time. Carver uses alcohol in his story to spark the conversation about love and also end the conversation about love. The sun is also used to symbolize the coming and going of happiness and love throughout the story. There are three types of love that can be drawn from this story: cynical love, spiritual love, unconditional love, and young love. The title of the story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” gives us great insight on what the subject of the story will mostly be. By looking at the title, we can see that not only are we talking about what it means to love in general, but also what the author truly believes the meaning of love is. Raymond Carver defines different degrees of various forms of love through symbolism in the characters and plot of the story.
Being in love with someone brings not only happiness but also pain. That pain is waiting. This reality is made clear in Dorothy Parker’s short story A Telephone Call. In this story, a woman is waiting for the call from her lover. She waited nervously as she promised to be phoned at 5. This woman knows that the anxiety that she felt was not needed, but she couldn’t restless. Parker uses the literary tools of irony, repetition, flashbacks, hyperbole to portray this hurting, yet loving scene.
After reading more than a dozen of Ray Carver’s short stories from his collection Where I'm Calling From, I have to ask the question, "Where was Carver calling from?" On the surface, his stories seem very simple. They are about people with average jobs such as hotel managers, waitresses, salesmen, and secretaries, who live unsophisticated, mediocre lives. Below the surface, however, there is always more to be discovered if the reader is willing to put forth a little bit of effort. Carver obviously put a lot of thought into his stories. The least that we, as readers, can do is scratch the surface a little, or better yet, dig deep into his words to see what he is really trying to say to us. This is a task that is easier said than done.
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.
In Raymond Carver's "Cathedral," the husband's view of blind men is changed when he encounters his wife's long time friend, Robert. His narrow minded views and prejudice thoughts of one stereotype are altered by a single experience he has with Robert. The husband is changed when he thinks he personally sees the blind man's world. Somehow, the blind man breaks through all of the husband's jealousy, incompetence for discernment, and prejudgments in a single moment of understanding.
Love is the greatest gift that God has bestowed upon mankind. Defining love is different for every culture, race, and religion. Walt Whitman’s love is ever changing for anyone who tries to love him or understand his work. Love can be broken down into a multitude of emotions, and feelings towards someone or some object. In order to find love that is searched for, preparations must be made to allow the full experience of Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand by Walt Whitman to be pious. Walt Whitman’s poem is devoted to the fullness of love, and a description of fantasy and reality. A journey to find love starts with knowledge that both participants are willing, and able to consummate their love in judgment under God. Time is the greatest accomplice to justify the energy and sacrifice needed to start developing the ingredients needed for love to grow. Each stanza is a new ingredient to add to the next stanza. Over time, this addition of each stanza will eventually lead to a conclusion. A conclusion that love is ever changing, and people must either change along with love or never know the miracle of love.
The poem “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allen Poe is a beautiful story that outlines events that happened between the speaker and his love. The story paints a mental picture of a love that is so strong that angels become jealous and take Annabel Lee away from the speaker, but even though she is gone, his love for her never ended. The story is full of imagery that leads to the central message of the story, which is love.