What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Raymond Carver wrote "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" in 1981, by doing this Carver also created the character Mel. This short story is written in first person narration from Nick, one of Mel's friends. Both of their wives, Terri (Mel) and Laura (Nick) are also in the kitchen having the love conversation with Mel and Nick. Mel is a forty five year old, tall, curly headed cardiologist. Mel also has an ex-wife with whom he had children with. Mel is related to the theme of Love being undefinable by bringing up the conversation of love, talking about several examples of what love is or is not, trying to prove his point even though he does not completely understand what love is, and being an example of undefinable love himself.

People are prone to others, to hold onto ideals they cherish the most. We as human beings need some sort of physical form to attach ourselves to no matter what circumstance may be presented in front of us. Love is just one of the many presented circumstances that require such attachments, the purest and most in depth circumstance that anyone could ever be a part of. The characters within the story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” are considered to be within the boundaries of an in-love relationship. They show the differences between couples, the good and evil, and even what the betrayal of previous marriages can do to a person’s ability to fall in love again. There is one key to being able to succeed without probable cause to

Raymond Carter speaks about two different types of love in the Story What We talk About When We Talk About Love. The two types of love are spiritual and true love. Spiritual love is when you are connected with your significant half on a spiritual level. That could mean feeling like you can’t live without that person or just loving them so much that you would do anything to be with them. An example of true love is waking up every morning and making a cup of coffee not just for you but for you and your partner. However in the end True love is more dominant because people learn to love again as Raymond

Carver uses the protagonist, Mel, to aggressively drive the couples discussion, as well as to exemplify the complexity in the endeavor to define true love. Therefore, Carver makes his assertion of Mel 's superiority within the first sentence of the story. "My friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right" (Carver 132). To the reader, Mel is immediately seen as competent, as surely he is the only person among the couples who can accurately relay the correct definition of love. However, Mel is in fact dumbfounded to the idea of love, and is aggressively participating in the conversation despite his clear failure of a marriage. "Mel and Terri, on the other hand, have been together five years, and their surface-level civility to one another barely masks a deep-seated anger and resentment. Mel 's alcoholism, and increasing drunkenness over the course of the evening, sets a tone of increasingly intensified menace to the whole conversation" (Overview). Therefore, not only is Mel in a failing marriage, but he appears to be the reason behind the decline. Yet, Mel 's pursuit of an absolute answer to love preseceeds unhindered, even as his thought process now begins to contradict itself. "If he sees that Ed 's passion hardly qualifies as love, he need not feel quite as emotionally threatened by the dead lover, but only up to a point. It would not, for example, enhance Mel 's self-image for him to see the parallel between Ed 's

While being in a dark place for a long time there usually is a time in life where it turns to light. You go through things in life where it brings you down and shows you better things that can happen in the future. That is what Authors Bobbie Ann Mason and Raymond Carver shows us in their stories. They explain relationships and how they are expressed differently by each and every one of us. The relationships between man and woman show us the differences between them and how they react with one another. Relationships complicate life and show great things that come out of them. The different ways people describe love it quite strange by showing abuse, loss, and emotion. In these two stories the authors explain how people

In “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love”, Carver introduces us to four characters talking over gin. The narrator, Nick, was with his wife Laura at Mel’s house, a cardiologist, who has been remarried to a woman named Terri. After a few drinks in the kitchen, the topic of love is brought up. Each of the four individuals express their different views on what love is. Even though the setting was in Mel’s kitchen, flash backs from the individuals took us to different settings. These flashbacks helped us see how they viewed love. Terri talked about her past relationship with an obsessive, abusive man. When Terri talked about the night see was beaten you could see the scene play out in your head. Although he was abusive, threatened her life, and eventually took his own, Terri proclaimed, “He loved me. In his own way maybe, but he loved me. There was love there” (paragraph 5). Mel goes on to argue with Terri about her view of love and shares a story of the kind of love that he saw once. When Mel tells his story about love, you can visualize the older couple in the hospital and the old man desperately wanting to see his wife. After Mel describes the man lying in the hospital bed, barely able to see through the eye-holes of his bandage, he states, “I’m telling you, the man’s heart was breaking because he couldn’t turn his goddamn head and see his goddamn wife”

The short story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” by Raymond Carver, invalidates the struggles and the lives of women, especially those that have experienced abuse. Carver oppresses women through lack of empathy for a victim and reinforcement of certain stereotypes.

Symbols are an essential part of daily life, since they help to express ideas without the need of a detailed explanation; traffic signs informing drivers without short paragraphs being posted in their place, facial gestures expressing feelings without having to describe them verbally, just to name a common couple. Likewise, symbols are a crucial part of a literary work, helping the author subtly incorporate concepts throughout the work. An author will deliberately incorporate a symbol into his or her literary work, which alone would mean nothing, but in context carries out a point the author is trying to make. "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" is a short story about four friends trying to find the true meaning of love, trying

In the story of Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk about Love”, the author can been seen to tackle a distortion of romantic love, which conventionally perpetuated by love stories and fairy tales. This story challenges the convention of how a love story is being told where usually it ends happily. This allows the author, Carver, to present the reader with his or her own choice to interpret the meaning of true love through the story’s characters: Mel, Terri, Nick (as the narrator) and Laura as they talk about the meaning of love while they are drinking. Each of these characters has their own ideas of what love is. Terri seems to be approval of Ed’s, her abusive ex-lover violent jealousy as a sign of love, while Mel, her husband disagrees with her. Mel, speaks the most of the dialogues in the story can be inferred to be still learning the meaning of love. Through his story of the old couple, the readers may think that love can be eternal. However, Mel also contradicts this virtue by expressing his desire to kill his first wife whom he loved more than life before. As for the narrator, his love to Laura can be seen as a steady, drama free and uncomplicated love shown by his affections towards his newly-wed wife through kisses, smiles and touches. He also mentions, “In addition to being in love, we like each other and enjoy one another 's company. She 's easy to be with.” This contradicts with Mel and Terri’s idea of love which is rarely easy. Laura, the narrator’s wife

Carver used this theme through displaying the transition of Bill being shown disconnected with his wife and often found alone in his neighbour house yet shown together as a team when in a difficult and unpredictable situation. “They stayed there. They held each other. They leaned into the door as if against a wind, and braced themselves.” (Carver, 1993, pg.19) Similar to Ann’s transition, Bill’s transition from being independent throughout most of the story to being more connected with his wife by having them seen behaving as a caring couple when in a difficult situation, magnifies the hopes of a ‘happily ever after’ factor for the readers. However in reality, the situation is still rather unpredictable and unattractive yet Carver presented these characters in such a way so that we humans perceive their connectedness as a hope to

“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” by Raymond Carver is a short story about four friends sitting around a kitchen table drinking gin and discussing their opinions what their definitions of love are. The theme of the story is the elusive nature of love. The author makes his theme come to live by the plot, conflict, setting, point of view, characters and motifs and symbols.

From the first half of the story we can clearly see the theme of love being universal, which then directs into the category of family relations and societal views of love. One of the major issues portrayed in between couples is the constant embracement of problems and the continuous tension in between two persons. However, we appreciate Terri (Mel’s wife) being very candor in front of her second husband, as she explains her stand on love. Moreover, from a direct point of view, one can identify that Terri is a figure of sexuality; both her and Mel find love lay on top of the base of sexuality. In the story, the narrator (Nick) mentions at the beginning how Mel “thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love,” and that he had “spent five years in a seminary” though he quit to go to medical school (Carver paragraph 3).

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is a collection of short stories by Raymond Carver. The themes in Raymond Carver’s short stories—alcoholism, poverty, and an interpersonal disconnect—are all reflective of his personal life.

It is no secret that some stories are very similar to one another. Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” and Englander’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” are no exception to this. Both share a common element, which is morality. Both stories focus on the morality of their respective characters. However, Englander’s story expands on this more than Carver’s story. By this we mean that Englander’s story has a much higher level of morality in it rather than Carver’s tale because he expands on everything involved. This is the biggest difference between the two narratives. We are able to find the similarity and this difference by examining the stories themselves

Throughout the ages, many have tried to comprehend the human experience of love and its ineffable and mysterious force that leads us to complete euphoria or utter despair, with songs, paintings, and stories. In Plato’s Symposium, six guest including Socrates, tackle and attempt to define love amongst each other. With each attempt, and our study of Johns gospel, the intertextuality between the symposium and John 15:8-17 helps one better understand the portrait that John portrays of Jesus as the ultimate lover and only way to being fully complete.