hi all,
here's a lit essay my sister wrote in 55 minutes (inclusive of 5 minutes reading time). feedback/comments much appreciated...
Raymond Carver?s collection of short stories Will You Please Be Quiet Please? presents a minimalist portrayal of ordinary people in crisis. Many of the stories are set against a backdrop of the largely faceless and homogenous mass of American suburbia and it is Carver?s juxtaposition of real people against a mundane and routine lifestyle that makes the stories so movingly authentic. Carver writes as an alchemist, transforming an account of a routine experience into a story which has the power to create a sense of melancholy or gnawing disquiet so that it almost seems tangible to the reader. As moving as they are, the collection largely suggests that human communication is marred by the limitations of language, isolating people from both others and greater society, and it is because of this alienation that people, must most often, face crises alone.
Passage two, from the story Signals, portrays a couple in crisis. While much of the story focuses on the aesthetic beauty of the restaurant and the dining experience itself, the true focus is whether there is actually a future for Wayne and Caroline? relationship. Many of Carver?s stories are similar in that they attempt to divert the focus of the reader from what is actually going on, such as in Nobody Said Anything, where a large portion of the story chronicles the boy?s fishing expedition, when the true focus is whether or not there is a future for his family. The dialogue of the characters in passage two seems very erratic, Caroline seeming at a crisis point when saying she has ?given [Ralph] the best years of [her] life? and then only seconds later suggesting the couple have dessert. Here, Carver focuses the bulk of the passage on the conversation, instead of the thought of the characters. This elliptical style of dialogue gives the reader space to imagine the feelings of the characters, but also gives a sense of how alienated from their own emotions the characters can be, as the reader themselves is barred from fully understanding the thoughts, feelings and motivations of the characters. The style of dialogue used in the passage not only makes the atmosphere tense as Caroline and Way are so erratic, but also gives the piece a sense of ambiguity, something which is generally emblematic of the collection of stories.
Passage three, from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? Similarly shows a commonplace and believable character at a point of crisis in his life. Ralph?s insecurities are revealed early on in the story as he remembers a view of his wife he had on their honeymoon, concluding in the frightening realisation that he could not see himself in tat picture. Ralph is because of this, isolated within his relationship, but also from himself, as from the outside looking in, he does not feel that he is a participant in his own life. Whilst passage three portrays a similar incident to passage two, they are subtly different and Carver uses a different prose style in passage three to demonstrate this.
Dialogue is appropriate for the second passage as it portrays a couple on the verge of a crisis, experiencing a difficulty to connect on a verbal level. Their chose to go to dinner appears to be a desperate application of a peripheral solution to a problem they can?t yet grapple with, similar to the bringing of the fish head home in Nobody Said Anything and Al?s getting rid of Suzy in Jerry, Molly and Sam. All of these characters feel that their actual crises are too painful to deal with, and so they apply unrelated solutions in the desperate hope that they will affect a change in their lives. This tendency of Carver?s characters to invest meaning in meaningless incidents is also seen at the end of the story Fat, where a routine part of life, becomes pregnant with meaning for a woman who convinces herself that the appearance of a fat man is a signal that her life is about to change. However passage three portrays a character, who after years of fearing isolation in his own relationship, and two years of sufferance as the result of a growing sense of failure, has been thrown into a crisis. Ralph is both isolated within his marriage and from himself as he struggles to deal with the crisis and identify his own emotions. Here, Carver?s prose style, although in third person, is constant and surging, and represents a stream of consciousness, like that which would exist in Ralph?s head. ?And then Ralph thought: Marian! Dorothea! Robert! He tried to imagine this years from now. But he could not imagine anything? and then Ralph?s visual image of his wife screaming ?Go! Go! Go!? shows, with moving authenticity, Ralph?s state of confusion. Many of Carver?s characters experience a gnawing, almost tangible sense of disappointment, dissatisfaction, failure or something else, which becomes almost solid to the reader in the realistic nature in which it is portrayed. Ralph?s observation at the end of passage three that evil ?only [needs] a little slip way, a little opening? is testament to Carver?s view that while faceless and mundane, life in suburbia can seem very menacing, felt most frequently by Carver?s characters while, feel uneasiness in the night time, such as in The Ducks, The Idea and The Student?s Wife.
Carver?s stories seem to celebrate the human condition, but also reveal the catastrophes that plague the lives of ordinary people and how they struggle to deal with them. All three passages demonstrate crises in relationships, as in passage two, Wayne and Caroline are uncertain as to their future together, in passage three, Ralph must work out his emotional response to his wife?s betrayal, and in passage one, Earl experiences a sense of failure at the realisation that other men don?t desire his wife.
All three passages are emblematic of the broader collection of stories both thematically and stylistically. Carver maintains a sense of ambiguity throughout his writing, having a greater tenancy towards understatement. He does, however, alert the reader as to how a single, inconspicuous incident can change someone?s life, such as a moment experienced by Earl, in learning that other men views his wife as fat. In some stories, such as Fat and Bicycles, Muscles and Cigarettes, it involves people investing meaning in an everyday experience, the incident in the latter story being the manifestation of Rogers pride in his father after fist fight in a truly poignant moment of connection between them. In other stories, these seemingly insignificant incidents involve the collision of two individuals on tow entirely different trajectories, and the effects it can have on them such as in the absurdist piece Collectors and the story Are You A Doctor? Through Carver?s portrayal of largely events and dialogue and clever employment of narrative gaps, the thoughts and feelings of characters remain ambiguous to the reader, but importantly to the characters themselves as a major thematic concern of the collection is in the way individuals grapple to articulate or even understand their own emotions. The three passages are also good demonstrators of Carver?s portrayal of men. In stories such as They?re Not Your Husband, What Do You Do in San Francisco and Are These Actual Miles, the reader senses failure in men who are unemployed. In many of Carver?s stories, unemployment is inextricably linked with relationship difficulty and isolation in general. What Do You Do in San Francisco and The Ducks also present the idea that a man can detach himself from emotional difficulty by losing himself in his occupation, seen when main character in The Ducks? dream of roulette wheel transforms into a saw mill.
Through Carver?s style of stream of consciousness-like prose, elliptical and erratic dialogue, he portrays the difficulties humans experience in dealing with their own emotions, making meaningful connections and confronting crises. It is the juxtaposition of such authentic characters against a faceless backdrop, whilst maintaining a sense of ambiguity about the thoughts and feelings of the characters that make the collection both genuine and powerfully moving.
1341 words
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