Alcoholism In Jerry And Molly And Sam By Raymond Carver

Scott Russell Sanders’ “Under the Influence” is about a family growing up with alcoholism, mental and physical abuse. When Sanders was very young, he didn’t recognize that his father was an alcoholic, but as he grew older, he saw the bloodshot eyes, hiding alcohol, the deceptions, and the dual personalities of an alcoholic. “My father drank. He drank as a gut-punched boxer gasps for breath, as a starving dog gobbles food—compulsively, secretly, in pain and trembling.” (215). Sanders story starts at the end, where his father dies from alcoholism. The turmoil and fear this family suffered because of their father’s alcoholism, is a story a lot of families are familiar with.

Carver’s “A Serious Talk” is another short story that perfectly demonstrates the damaging affects of alcohol addiction on both the addict and those who surround them. In the story, a woman named Vera is visited by her ex-husband Burt, who arrives to give

Many alcoholics are so preoccupied with their addictions, that issues and activities that were once of interest to them, are no longer a concern. The alcoholic then becomes oblivious to his responsibilities for his or her children. Children of alcoholics often suffer from neglect. According to the Children of Alcoholics Foundation, each year “1.2 million children are confirmed by state agencies as being victims of child neglect. Forty percent of these cases involve alcohol or drugs. This suggests that an estimated

Alcoholism does not only affect a person’s physical, mental, and emotional state, but it also changes the lives of people close to the drinker forever. It ruins relationships and trust that took years to build up, and may never be able to be restored. In Jeannette Walls’s memoir, The Glass Castle, she tells the story of her childhood in which her father was an alcoholic. Jeannette’s father, Rex Walls, was brilliant and charismatic when he was sober, but when he drank, he was destructive and dishonest.

“Alcohol addiction stunts the spiritual, emotional and mental growth of a person”~Anonymous. Sherman Alexie’s novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian, is a book based off the author’s teenage life. The novel is about a poor 14 year old named Junior who faced numerous challenges in his life. Junior has experienced bullying, he was called a traitor for following his dreams, got in a huge fight with his best friend and lost three very important people in his life because of alcohol. Fortunately in the end, Junior got through the pain and lived on but he learned many lessons. One of the lessons Junior learned was that the fall into addiction, in this situation alcohol, leads to a great deal of misery for the individual and those

“'The Father.” By Hugh Garner is a short story involving two characters; and a father and son’s troubled relationship. The story touches on how you can be there and have the responsibilities of being a father without actually being a father. The dad John Purcell and his son are going to the son’s Boy scout banquet meeting the following night. John grudgingly replies that he will go only for his son since the banquet only happens once a year. On the way to the meeting, John makes awkward small talk with the son he barely knows. Proceeding to get to the church he ruins the evening because of the alcohol he consumes earlier in the night; which causes him to become impaired and unable to make proper decisions. The story brings up the effects of alcoholism and how it is the object you turn to to help you through uneventful or stressful situations. It brings up qualities that a good parent does not and should not have.

when she gets angry. She refuses to listen to his apologies and ends up leaving. Holden thinks that Sally is very phony of a person. Holden meets Carl Luce and tries to talk about sex with him , which annoys Carl and he leaves Holden early, but Holden continues to drink and ultimately gets very drunk. Holden is exhausted both physically and mentally and decides that it is time to go home. He sneaks into his apartment and wakes up Phoebe to be able to let her know what is going on. He tells her of his fantasy of himself being a Catcher In The Rye, a person who catches little children as they are about to fall off of a cliff. Phoebe tells him that he has misremembered the Robert Burns’s poem which says “if a body meet a body, coming through the

and spanned a course of some twenty years. Two decades of conflict and disharmony that seemed to connect with many of the attendees displayed by their numerous head nods and looks of shared shame. He said he never intended to become an alcoholic. He was just trying to “fit in” with friends. Another reason given for using alcohol was to squash the stress and anxieties all too familiar with the formative years of pre-adulthood. “Little did I know”, he said that he was setting the stage for how to handle all his subsequent problems later in life.

Since the beginning of time people have been using all kinds of substances to make them feel liberated. Alcohol and marijuana are consumed every day in America by teenagers to elderly people; there is no set range on who consumes these drugs. Despite efforts from imposed laws: people feel the need to consume these substances and encage in behaviors out of the ordinary. Drugs and alcohol are used in the story “Cathedral” but also they are used in Raymond Carver’s personal life.

In “The Shining”, written by Steven King, the reader is exposed to an issue that a lot of families face in the real world that of which is alcoholism. The story’s main character, Jack Torrance, struggles from this issue due to his troubled past regarding an abusive and alcoholic father as well as his struggle of becoming the very man he loved, yet hated as a child. By exposing the reader to alcoholism, they are instantly aware of the outcomes of it and how it can affect someone. King uses this method to help enhance the story, to allow the contents of the book to become real and relatable to the reader, and most importantly, to allow the reader to actually sympathize with the main characters.

Chapter nine expands on the spousal role and incorporates the entire family system. As with any disease, the alcoholic will be a key issue in how the family operates, thinks, and feels. The chapter discusses these issues and brings up points of possible emotions that I found would be helpful for the family to be conscious of in their alcoholic relative and in themselves. Chapter ten is a piece written by a business man who initially fired alcoholics and later began to understand their plight as his own. The instances of death and suicide after the businessman fired the individuals led the businessman to drink himself but, later on, begin to help those with alcoholism deal with their issues and work to keep their jobs. Another important piece to this chapter is that the employer can have options once the alcoholic maintains the job. The Big Book even discusses how the employer could use the alcoholic as a liaison to help others in his workforce.

Buy a drink, down the drink, buy another, down another; make a mistake, drink some more, blackout and do it again. A constant cycle seen through the actions of the characters in The Sun Also Rises as they, some more than others, turn to a depressant liquid that forces them to behave in belligerent, self-destructive ways. Alcoholism has served as a means of escape for these immature, unsatisfied characters. Though these characters live in a constant state of drunkenness, their crime is the inability to face the fact that their impaired senses are destroying relationships and building tensions. These alcoholics drink as if it were their professions, resulting in unexpected and unforgiving actions. In The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway uses alcohol-dependent character, Mike Campbell to convey that people turn to substance abuse as a permanent distraction away from life’s unbearable realities.

Raymond Carver’s “Jerry and Molly and Sam” is a short, but realistic, assessment about a man named Al.  Al is struggling in life to the point everything around him induces a high level of stress in return. Throughout the story he uses alcohol, driving or both as coping mechanisms instead of facing his problems head on. By using these juvenile strategies, Al “ wished he could keep driving and driving and driving tonight…stopping when he came to where his mother lived, and never, never for any reason ever, ever leave again.” (Carver 19). This shows that Al wants to be a child and doesn’t want the responsibility. As a result, Al’s hardships and anxiety send him into a deep state of depression and mid-life crisis.

In literature, authors may get inspiration from real life events. For Raymond Carver, rather than writing about his own life, he wrote fictional stories, poems and books, but each can relate to his personal experiences. Alcohol plays a dominant part in Carver’s life, from child to adult. Due to this, his texts revolve around alcohol in some form, most often an alcoholic main character. Through Carver’s writing, he displays family tensions often as a result of alcoholism. Sara Kornfeld Simpson, instructor at Boston University, states that in Carver’s short stories “alcohol serves as a social lubricant that diminishes inhibitions, which allows hidden tensions and emotions to emerge.” (Simpson). Raymond Carver’s personal experience with alcoholism led him to create fictional texts that revolve around alcohol and have characters that may reflect his personal life, leading into his career as a writer.

“An Alcoholic Case” is the story of a nurse who is assigned with an alcoholic case. Throughout the story, she struggles to take care of her patient, but at the same time is worried about his sanity. One comes to realize the cause of the patient’s alcoholism when the narrator states, “She knew there were three medals from the war in his jewel box...” and it becomes clear why the man is suffering so much (Fitzgerald 334). He had psychological scars because of what had happened to him while serving in World War I. Similarly, “My son the murder” is a short-story about Leo, a father who becomes