Minimalism by Raymond Carver Essay

the plot in the story, the minimalistic style, and theme, the author better develops and conveys

Carver lived most of his life in a world which could not provide the luxury of

People deal with grief in different ways. As a small child, the way the narrator handles uncertainty and pain is distressing, yet also expected. She finds distractions in the furniture and decorations. The child notices a

His diction let’s you sense the carelessness and monotony of the characters lives. This style of writing shows the reader that the worth and value of the individual is not

Raymond Carver was an American writer who was famous for his minimalist style of writing. Even though according to Ann Beattie in an interview in The Paris Review he resented the title, Carver is mostly known for his minimal short stories. Among his many stories the writer of this article chose Cathedral to discuss. Since the story is filled with numerous gaps it is the perfect story to be analyzed with subjective reader-response theory introduced by David Bleich and his idea of symbolic objects which is the experience that a reader goes through while reading the story. According to Bleich

This bitterness and sarcasm is revealed as strong characteristics of the narrator. Throughout the majority of the story, the narrator continues shows his distaste for any "happy" situation. Much like the hyphenated asides, Carver implements fragmented sentences behind description, to show the narrator pausing for a moment of color commentary.

Typically a story begins with an exposition, which introduces the characters, setting and plot. In the short story ?Popular Mechanics? by Raymond Carver, the exposition is excluded. The story begins with a short rise in action, moves quickly to the climax and totally omits the resolution. Carver uses third person objective narration to reveal the actions and the dialogue between a man and a woman. The narrator gives very little descriptive details, never revealing the characters? thoughts or their motivation. This allows the reader the freedom to interpret and develop their own opinions of the setting, plot, and characters of the story. This also stimulates the reader to

The sister prepares the evening meal, making her contribution to the family; and calls on the boy to come and eat. The saw in the boy?s hands was still running and when he took his attention away from his work, and that split second of carelessness cost him an extremity. His instincts raised his arm upward to keep all the blood from spilling out immediately. When he realized what was happening, the boy finally realized he was to young to be doing a man?s work. The boy ?saw all spoiled,? and now knew his whole childhood had vanished and it was impossible to get it back. The boy frantically called out to his sister to make the doctor keep his hand on. The boy?s body must have instantly gone into shock and not felt the absence of the hand. When the doctor arrived he gave him some ether to make him go to sleep. The little boy began to lose his pulse and soon he was a stranger to the world. The people surrounding the boy never expected the loss of his hand to tragically end the little boy?s life. Frost?s almost appalling casual description of death shocks the reader enough to make them think. ?Since they were not the one dead, turned to their affairs,? describes the environment of the survivors. They are forced to move on with their life and keep working because they cannot afford to stop and mourn.

The last line in the poem “and since they were not the ones dead, turned to their own affairs” lacks the emotions the reader would expect a person to feel after a death of a close family member. But instead, it carries a neutral tone which implies that death doesn’t even matter anymore because it happened too often that the value of life became really low, these people are too poor so in order to survive, they must move on so that their lives can continue. A horrible sensory image was presented in the poem when the “saw leaped out at the boy’s hand” and is continued throughout the poem when “the boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh…the hand was gone already…and that ended it”, this shows emphasis to the numbness the child felt. The poem continues with the same cold tone without any expression of emotion or feelings included except for pain, which emphasizes the lack of sympathy given. Not only did the death of this child placed no effect on anyone in the society but he was also immediately forgotten as he has left nothing special enough behind for people to remember him, so “since they were not the one dead, turned to their affairs”. This proves that life still carries on the same way whether he is present or not, as he is insignificant and that his death

With a unique and brilliant style of writing, Raymond Carver has left a lasting and outstanding impact on the history of short stories. Even though Raymond Carver left a long impact, his life was of the opposite. Like Raymond Carver’s famous award winning stories, his life was short. Raymond Carver was born on May 25th, 1938 in Clatskanie, Oregon, a mill town on the Columbia River. Carver grew up in Yakima, Washington. Carver had three members to his small family, his mother, his father, and brother. Carver’s only had one sibling, his younger brother, James Franklin Carver. Carver’s mother worked as a waitress and a retail clerk while Carver’s father worked as a fisherman and a saw mill worker. Many say that a skilled sawmill worker and

The short story is written in a colloquial tone and reads similarly to an unfocused train of thought, conveying simplicity and realism within the piece. The narrator frequently drifts from a complete statement to an aside throughout the narrative; for example, while discussing the poem his wife composed about her friend Robert he offhandedly recalls, “...I didn’t think much of the poem. Of course, I didn’t tell her that. Maybe I just don’t understand poetry,” (Carver 356). This passage, and others similar to it, cause the flow of the plot to meander, rather than adhere to a strict linear format. Additionally, while the abrupt and nonchalant remarks hold little substance to the narrator, they give the reader a window to the substantial disconnect between the narrator and his peers.

Carver uses foreshadowing as a prominent element in this story. There are many examples of foreshadowing throughout the story. The first time the reader gets to see obvious foreshadowing is when the woman picks up the picture of the baby off the bed where the man is packing his belongings. “Then she noticed the baby’s picture on the bed and picked it up. He looked at her and she wiped her eyes and stared at him before turning and going back to the living room” (277). This small detail foreshadows that physical altercation that the couple will go through with the baby. The last big foreshadow that the reader gets is when the couple knocks over the flower pot. “The baby was red-faced and screaming. In the scuffle they knocked own a flowerpot that hung behind the stove” (277). This is very brief and only mentioned in this sentence. But this is the foreshadowing of the relationship that is broken, or even worse the baby being broken along with the relationship. While there are details at the beginning on the story, there are smaller things that can easily be looked over but are very important. The characters in this story, since it is minimalist fiction, are not ever given names. The characters are always just referred to as; the man, the woman, and the baby. The audience never finds out why the couple is breaking

Moreover, Carver uses first person point of view to describe the narrator’s life and the meaning of the cathedral to him. Through the first person point of view given to the narrator and one of the main characters of the story, Carver is able to portray a narrator who is jealous and insecure of himself. The narrator’s

“The Bath” and “A Small, Good Thing” contains the allowance of scheme, point of view, and dialog. In “The Bath”, the result of the child Scotty's condition is unidentified to the reader. This generates tension in the story that is restricted, a promise of conclusion unsatisfied. “A Small Good Thing” is a much more sustaining story because the reader experiences the heartbreak of Scotty's death as well as the reclamation of the baker. The delay of the plot also creates a greater sense of the tragedy because we understand that everyone in this story is a victim, the parents, the doctors, and the baker himself. Carver explores the theme of communication in this story. For Example, he states, “The following Monday, when Scotty is walking to school with his friend, Scotty tries to persuade his friend to tell him what he has bought him for his birthday however his friend doesn’t

His view is to let readers realize that life is a roller coaster that many things can inexplicably happen, though sometimes it seemed life was going well. For instance, the story claims, "I had been a good life till now. There had been work, fatherhood, family. The man had been lucky and happy...The child had been hit by a car and he was in the hospital..."(Carver, 1989, p. 49). This subtle contrast expressed herein is to make author's message abundantly clear, and perfectly articulate to me what is the author's view: Life is unpredictable, and it has ups and downs along the