Raymond Carver’s text “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” is a short story set in Albuquerque New Mexico, where four friends are sitting around a table drinking gin and socializing on the topic of love and their knowledge of it. In such a short story Carver demonstrates love from several distinct avenues. From love that sparks abuse, to love that brings an old man to tears. He incites questions on love such as Does it end? Can it be mistaken? And How should you show it? Earnestly observing this story and reading from the context of his life, from a brief biography, it is apparent that there are parallels, and that those parallels reveal what Carver’s love philosophy. Three main arguments are that Carver believes love has a close connection with pain; it can be both simple and complicated simultaneously, and that the word love is ambiguous. Carver at one time in his life could be described …show more content…
In “What we talk about when we talk about love.” Carver wanted his audience to notice what he thought and lived with respect to love. The realism in this work intertwined with background knowledge on the mind it came from reveals that it was not only known it was felt. Carver was in Ed’s shoes and Mel’s shoes and the narrator’s shoes gaining experience and building an opinion of what love really meant to him. Knowing it was written in the same timeframe as his commitment to sobriety could mean that this piece of literature offered him clarity, clarity that allows the audience an open window in his world. From what was read the people can infer that Carver feels that love can be both simple and perplexing in the same instance, that love and pain are inalienable, whether it is felt by the same person or not, and that love is ambiguous and that the interpretation is to be made by the person feeling
As we are born, we develop natural instincts that we evolve and grow over time. One of these instincts is love. Love can be full of sunshines and butterflies, but with love also comes pain and sacrifice. The book Salvage the Bones contains at least five big examples of loves as pain or sacrifice. Throughout the book, we will see examples of this theme of love as sacrifice and pain through different situations. I am going to walk through these situations. For instance, Death during childbirth, giving up a lifestyle due to teen pregnancy, sacrificing a close relationship, illness and flood.
The title of the poem “Love is Not All” asserts the impression that suggests the unimportant of love to its reader at first. However, the ending of the poem reveals the ironic truth that love is worthwhile. Millay’s intention is not to confuse readers by using a title that forcefully disrespects love. However, she projects the title of the poem to ascertain the grounds for her argument that love is important. The first six lines of the poem highlight the incompetence of love when compares with the basic supplies for life.
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?”
Love and affection is an indispensable part of human life. In different culture love may appear differently. In the poem “My god my lotus” lovers responded to each other differently than in the poem “Fishhawk”. Likewise, the presentation of female sexuality, gender disparity and presentation of love were shown inversely in these two poems. Some may argue that love in the past was not as same as love in present. However, we can still find some lovers who are staying with their partners just to maintain the relationship. We may also find some lovers having relationship only because of self-interest. However, a love relationship should always be out of self-interest and must be based on mutual interest. A love usually obtains its perfectness when it develops from both partners equally and with same affection.
Let’s turn to Mel’s story. He gives a story of what happened in the hospital to show what true love is. A couple months ago, an old couple who had been in a car accident came into the hospital, Of course, they survived, but the man was badly injured. He is unable to turn his head after a car accident, he feels so unhappy, because he will never look at his wife again, who is just beside him.... ...
Overall, “Love” is about death and the students love for their teacher, even though it is not what it is played out to be. Maxwell demonstrates this through his tone, point of view, word choice, and sentence structure, in which coordinates with the overall theme of death. He uses his sentence structure to show the perspective of a fifth grade student. In addition, he also uses short descriptive sentences to show how a fifth grade student would tell a story. Maxwell also uses specific word choice that adds detail to his short sentences, in order to foreshadow Miss. Vera Brown’s Death. Each of these formal features helps shape his essay around the theme death, in which involves close attention in order to understand
The short story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, by Raymond Carver, is about two married couples drinking gin and having a talk about the nature of love. The conversation is a little sloppy, and the characters make some comments which could either be meaningless because of excessive alcohol in the bloodstream, or could be the characters' true feelings because of excessive alcohol in the bloodstream. Overall, the author uses this conversation to show that when a relationship first begins, the people involved may have misconceptions about their love, but this love will eventually die off or develop into something much more meaningful.
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.
This passage marks the first of several types of love, and gives us an intuitive
Love has the power to do anything. Love can heal and love can hurt. Love is something that is indescribable and difficult to understand. Love is a feeling that cannot be accurately expressed by a word. In the poem “The Rain” by Robert Creeley, the experience of love is painted and explored through a metaphor. The speaker in the poem compares love to rain and he explains how he wants love to be like rain. Love is a beautiful concept and through the abstract comparison to rain a person is assisted in developing a concrete understanding of what love is. True beauty is illuminated by true love and vice versa. In other words, the beauty of love and all that it entails is something true.
Some may say love is just an emotion while others may say it is a living and breathing creature. Songs and poems have been written about love for hundreds and thousands of years. Love has been around since the beginning of time, whether someone believes in the Big Bang or Adam and Eve. Without love, there wouldn’t be a world like it is known today. But with love, comes pain with it. Both William Shakespeare and Max Martin know and knew this. Both ingenious poets wrote love songs of pain and suffering as well as blossoming, newfound love. The eccentric ideal is both writers were born centuries apart. How could both know that love and pain work hand in hand when they were born 407 years apart? Love must never change then. Love survives and stays its original self through the hundreds and thousands of years it has been thriving. Though centuries apart, William Shakespeare and Max Martin share the same view on love whether i...
The couple with which Carver spends a majority of the time exploring is Mel and Terri and their sentimental love. The two "have been together for five years, been married for four." (Carver 154). The form of love between this couple is labeled as sentimental love. Mel and Terri have been together long enough to have gotten past
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.
Love can take many shapes and forms. There are many different kinds of love between human beings. Though it is often overlooked, intentionally or not, loss comes hand in hand with love; it is the second face of love that no one wants to see or experience. With love comes the potential to lose it as well. Nicole Krauss’s book, The History of Love, is really about loss.
The Symposium, The Aeneid, and Confessions help demonstrate how the nature of love can be found in several places, whether it is in the mind, the body or the soul. These texts also provide with eye-opening views of love as they adjust our understanding of what love really is. By giving us reformed spectrum of love, one is able to engage in introspective thinking and determine if the things we love are truly worthy of our sentiment.