Analysis of Carver's "What We Talk about When We Talk about Love"

     In contrast to these fairly pessimistic views on love, the author describes an instance in which a couple found true love. Mel tells an anecdote of an old couple that was admitted to the emergency room after a very bad car accident. The two people were wrapped up in full body casts, and as a result they could not see each other. Mel noticed that the old man was very sad, even

Carver’s short story “Cathedral” is about a man and a woman who are married. The woman’s blind friend Robert, whose wife just died is coming to stay with them because he plans on visiting his dead wife’s relatives nearby. Robert knew the man’s wife because she worked for him one summer, reading to Robert. The wife and Robert stayed in touch over the years by sending tapes to each other, and letting each other know about what was going on in their lives. When the man hears Robert is coming over he makes idiotic comments about Robert’s wife and felt that Robert would be a burden on them because he is blind. The man and the woman proceed to argue over the situation. The wife tells her husband, “If you had a friend, any friend, and the friend came to visit, I’d make him feel comfortable” (Carver, “Cathedral” 34). The man responds to this by stating, “I don’t have any blind friends” (Carver, “Cathedral” 34). When Robert finally arrives, they converse, drink, and eat together. After, the wife goes upstairs, the man and Robert begin to smoke some weed together. While the wife was sleeping, they start watching TV together and talking. Robert asks the man to explain to him what a cathedral looks like because cathedrals came up on the TV. The man has trouble explaining it and cannot describe to Robert what a cathedral looks like. Then Robert asks the man to draw a cathedral with him. Robert request that the man close his eyes, and they begin to draw. This is where the story ends and it seems that this is when the man became aware of the difficult lives blind people live as he could not explain what a cathedral looked like, and he could not see his drawing.

In this global era of evolving civilization, it is increasingly difficult to ignore the fascinating fact about love. Love is a feeling of intimacy, warmth, and attachment. Love is inevitable and it plays a vital role in human life as Janie uses her experience with the pear tree to compare each of her relationships, but it is not until Tea Cake that she finds “a bee to her bloom.” (106).

We live in a society that has increasingly stomped on love, depicting it as cruel, superficial and full of complications. Nowadays it is easy for people to claim that they are in love, even when their actions say otherwise, and it is just as easy to claim that they are not when they really are. Real love is difficult to find and keeping it alive is even harder, especially when one must overcome their own anxieties and uncertainties. This is the main theme present in Russell Banks’ short story “Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story,” as well as in “The Fireman’s Wife,” written by Richard Bausch. These narratives, although similar in some aspects, are completely different types of love stories.

Authors across time have used various relationship models in their works of writing in order to communicate their beliefs about love. By examining the relationship between two unlike brothers in his short story, “Sonny’s Blues,” James Baldwin communicates his belief that the idea of love can save people. Jhumpa Lahiri, in her short story “Hell-Heaven” also shows that the idea of love can save people, but by the end the characters are only truly happy where there is acceptance. Both Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” and Lahiri short story “Hell- Heaven” while culturally different, use the trials and tribulations of their characters to prove that the idea of love is a saving force.

Love exists in the short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” by Alice Munro and in the short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” by Raymond Carver. in Munro’s short story the plot is that of a mentally ill wife, Fiona, who falls in love with another patient while her husband still tries to hang on to their old love. Her husband eventually wants to have an affair with the wife of the man his wife is having an affair with. Their love changed because of their circumstances due to ill health. Carver’s story discusses the different definitions of love due to the type and quality of relationships; everyone has a different definition. Love also exists all over the world within different environments and cultures. The concept of love depends upon the environment in which it inhabits. Love is dependent on the life of the people in love and it also depends on their current environment. Nature and nurture are also huge factors into the development and process of love. What nature and nurture mean is whether it is due to how the person lives and acts along with their personality compared to whether it’s all in their genetics beforehand. Love is more on the nurture side instead of the nature side of human experience.

In Raymond Carver’s story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” there is a wide array of opinions concerning the true definition of love. I believe that the character with the most absurd idea of love is Mel. Mel is Terri’s second husband. He claims to only believe in spiritual love. In his past, Mel spent “five years in seminary.” This is obviously what he bases his idea upon. Mel declares that if he could go back in time, he would enjoy being a knight in armor to shield him from other people. This reveals to me that Mel is emotionally closed off and concealed from other people. Furthermore, as seen through his wife, Terri, Mel does not have the passion inside him that is necessary to experience love. The only love that Mel does experience is the love toward his children, but that is love in a different sense. Loving his children is a natural instinct. They are born into his care, and are made with his own blood. His love for them was not searched for. It just came to be when they were born. Mel’s relationship with Terri, or any other women that he may have encountered in the past is distant and indifferent as to who they are inside. Mel’s ideas toward love are

Love makes us do crazy things. It makes us become people we never thought we were. Love gives us an ultimatum about our life. Love is a powerful bond and wicked curse. When we love, we love hard. We will do anything for love and to be loved. In “My Sister’s Marriage,” Cynthia Marshall Rich presents the different views of love upon similar yet different characters. Two sisters, who share a loving yet manipulative Father show the different ways love affects us. Sarah-Ann and Olive have many similar and different relationships with love, their dreams, and their traits.

   Love is one of the most confusing emotions that one can experience. It is simple yet complicated, unconditional but demanding, overused and unique. It is hard to explain what its means to feel love, to feel loved, or to be in love, however, there are aspects of love that are easily expressed. For example, ones unquestionable affection to the one they love, or the hardships and sacrifice that is endured for loved ones, and the underlying fact that once it is experienced it is not easily dismissed. The play Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller describes love in just these ways, and, most of all, as the ultimate moral value that is the eternal bond that keeps people together. One can

Love stands-out to be one of the most prevalent qualities known to humans and found in any relationship. Not to mention, the world is a place where most people seek love. No matter who or what it is, love can be expressed to anyone, ranging from family to the public or work, and to romantic relationships. Showing love to someone can be represented in multiple ways, such as taking care, supporting others in need, or simply saying ‘I love you’ to someone. The focus here is on love in relationships. In romantic relationships, love builds further emotions and enables one to develop more character traits and personalities to their love. In the novel “Eleanor and Park” by Rainbow Rowell, the two protagonists Eleanor and Park show how they resolve conflicts in their relationship, as they both have sentiments of love throughout the novel and discover more emotions and traits with each other, from the heart. Acknowledging this allows one to say that love enables one to show courage, supported by the bus scene when Eleanor was ecstatic, the bus students bullying Eleanor, and Eleanor’s conflict with her family but solved with the help of Park.

How are you engaging with the ones closest to you? This is the question author James W. Pennebaker attempts to unravel to you in chapter 8 of his book Secret Life of Pronouns. He does this by analyzing conversations, essay responses, and Language Style Matching Scores to present his argument. Many different conversations are analyzed through this text starting with two college students in love over instant messaging. Through this conversation the author deciphers, "Both members of the couple are closely attentive to each other and repeat many of the same words and phrases" (197). The author categorizes this as LSM or Language Style Matching which is the matching of function words between two people. The author goes

In the poem, The Love song, written by T.S. Elliot, J Alfred Prufrock is a man who is very lonely and insecure. He goes throughout his life wishing for a change, but never stepping up to the plate and actually making a change. The title of the poem portrays to the reader that the poem is going to be full of love and romance. The reader soon found out later that the poem is just the opposite from the title, a sad, lonesome man who is not only lacking love, but also lacking self confidence and self esteem.

In M. Scott Peck’s work, The Road Less Traveled, he says “Love is too large, too deep ever to be truly understood or measured or limited within the framework of words” (81). He also seeks to define love as “The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's personal growth” (81). For Peck, he recognizes that the nature of love is so mysterious that a true satisfactory definition of love has yet to be created and suspects his own definition to be inadequate. He also recognizes that love is categorically vast in that it is divided into eros, philia, agape, and others.

Is it real love if they died and you could move on and fall in love again? All these questions are discussed. Terri defends the fact that although her ex-boyfriend would hit her and drag her that he did in fact love her. In his episodes of abuse, he would say “I love you”. She believes that although it may seem psychotic, “…people are different […]. Sure, sometimes he may have acted crazy. Okay. But he loved me. In his own way maybe, but he loved me.” (Carver 657). Mel is appalled and believes there is no way anyone could consider this love. But I think the message Carver is trying to show is that this ex-boyfriend may have had serious issues and even though Terri was staying with a man that didn’t treat her right but there was something keeping these two together. Even after the man killed himself because of love Terri continued to say that she felt bad for him, showing that the care you feel for a loved one will never disappear. Mel then brings up the point although we can be undeniably in love with someone. there’s a chance we will move on one day and fall in love with someone else. With his ex-wife, he had experienced the kind of love in which everything she did he felt gooey love for until one day he hated everything she did. When he reflects on this he looks at Terri and acknowledges he’s found new love. He tells the story of two elderly people who get into a car

With time and many new encounters along the way he truly knew what is felt like to love when placed into the arms of four-year old Sarah Ruth, whom later dies. In our time at The University of South Florida each and every single one of us experienced love. Love into our professions, from the arts to the sciences. We explored and experienced new places, and new faces from classroom to classroom, study abroad, and internships. Each one along the way built a pathway to where we are now. Like Edward our lives are about to change and we will begin to love deeper through every encounter and experience from now on.