Technique and Sensibility in the Fiction and Poetry of Raymond Carver

Arthur F. Bethea

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780815340409
• eBook ISBN: 9781136544712
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A comprehensive examination of the fiction and poetry of Raymond Carver.

Chapter One
Reassessing Indeterminacy’s Importance

An Examination of the Unreliable Narrators in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

Indeterminacy in Carver’s fiction has been a main topic for critics. Author of the first scholarly book on Carver, Arthur Saltzman asserts, “Carver’s technique shows how even the most modest foray into the world at large overwhelms the ability to absorb anything at all” (11). As a number of his readings imply, Saltzman believes that the inability to know is, to a considerable extent, shared by characters and readers. More explicit in advancing this argument, Jiirgen Pieters contends that our “expectations” to deduce a story’s meaning “will, to some degree, remain frustrated, and that, by extension, [our] fate is not different from that of the characters portrayed in the fiction” (92). “The indecisiveness in which Carver’s characters are caught turns out to be ... no more than a reflection of the indecisiveness in which the reader is caught ... ” (76).

Marc Chenetier, Michael Trussler, Kirk Nesset, and Jon Powell are other Carver scholars who have emphasized the ambiguous or indeterminate nature of Carver’s stories. To be sure, indeterminacy is an important part of Carver’s fiction, yet at times critics seem to lose sight of just how much meaning Carver’s technique actually determines. Focusing on Carver’s first collection of stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, this chapter examines unreliable narration, a technique that, by its very nature, should contribute to indeterminacy. In only two stories, however-“What Do You Do in San Francisco?” and “Why, Honey?”-is indeterminacy critical. Whether the cause is indifference to introspection, linguistic and cognitive limitations, inexperience, self-induced mental numbness, or fear, Will You Please?’s first-person narrators perceive and narrate their experiences in ways that call for reader correction which, for the most part, we can make; that is, despite the narrator’s unreliability and sometimes only because of it, the texts determine character motivation and theme clearly enough.

“Night School” and “Collectors”

Narrative unreliability is least noticeable in “Night School” and “Collectors.” Both narrators are uninterested in examining their experience, however, and in key places their stories resonate with double meanings, only one of which, the surface and literal, the narrators recognize.

One of Carver’s quintessential losers, the narrator of “Night School” is broke, unemployed, out of school, stuck at home with his parents, his marriage having “just fallen apart,” with an implausible desire to become a teacher (94). On the evening central to the story, he meets two women in a bar who are learning to read in a continuing education course at the college that he occasionally attends. One says that the narrator reminds her “a lot of Patterson,” her instructor (96); the other woman, Edith, says that she and her friend “have something” on their teacher (97). The women buy the narrator two beers, desiring a ride to Patterson’s house where they intend to make the instructor “drop his cookies” (98).

The story does not reveal what the women “have” on Patterson or their exact intentions. If these minor points are indeterminate, however, a more important issue, the narrator’s condition, is quite clear. As he does in “They’re Not Your Husband,” “Collectors,” and “What Is It?,” Carver links unemployment or bankruptcy to an emotional or moral paucity and, in a related motif, uses a car as “a trope for its owner’s worth or identity” (Powell, “Diss” 69), in this case, the lack of a car underscoring the narrator’s stasis. Although the narrator claims to have a car, it actually belongs to his father. When his request for the car is rejected, as he knew it would be, he deserts the women, stranding them outside his parents’ house as midnight approaches.

Although not obviously unreliable, the narrator cares little for self-analysis, so his experience’s meaning escapes him. In one remark, quite unbeknownst to the quasi-somnambulant character, a double voice emerges, Carver’s silent voice significantly magnifying the import of what is said. Intent on literally staying home that evening, the narrator tells his father: “I’m not going anywhere” (100). He then immediately describes (to us, not his father) a dream that he read about, a dream involving a man who dreamed he was dreaming and suffering paralysis. Although the narrator as-says no interpretation, the dream passage clearly emphasizes his stasis or lifeless condition and recontexualizes the earlier remark to his father. When he says “I’m not going anywhere,” his dream of teaching is revealed as implausible fantasy; the narrator is headed nowhere in life with agonizing slowness.

Even worse off, the unemployed narrator of “Collectors” is hiding from collection agents when a vacuum-cleaner salesman named Aubrey Bell arrives at the front door, claiming that Mrs. Slater has won a prize, all the while assuming that he is speaking with Mr. Slater. The narrator refuses to admit he is Slater and, indeed, may not be. This indeterminacy is not problematical, however, for it underscores the story’s central theme involving the absence or loss of identity.

While giving the narrator his pseudo prize, a demonstration of the vacuum’s capabilities, Bell comments ironically on the insidious, inexorable decay of life: “Every day, every night of our lives, we’re leaving little bits of ourselves, flakes of this and that, behind. Where do they go, these bits and pieces of ourselves? Right through the sheets and into the mattress, that’s where!” (105). In an act signifying the narrator’s impotence, Bell starts to clean the bed even though he is asked to leave, setting the vacuum on “full strength” (106). The bed’s filth speaks to a shattered marriage and a life in limbo (though we, not the narrator, create meaning out of a dirty bed).

In the first paragraph, the narrator claims that “any day” he “expected to hear” about a job (102). Immediately after he indicates that “a box of Mouse-Be-Gone” is the sole object in his closet (107)-failing to see self-definition in this detail that parallels his sole occupancy of the house-the mail arrives. “Twice” he tries to get the letter, but Bell seems to “cut” him off with “his sweeping” (108). The letter, which Bell asserts is addressed to Slater, may well contain employment information, but the salesman pockets the letter, stealing, according to David Boxer and Cassandra Phillips, the narrator’s “remaining dregs of self” (86).

The narrator admits that he “couldn’t pay ... a dollar if” his “life depended on it” (108-09). As with “Night School”’s narrator, this poverty has larger implications of spiritual and emotional evisceration, yet the narrator does not have a clue to how seriously tapped out he is. Like “Night School”’s narrator, he does not have a car, a fact that only emphasizes his stasis. His inability to take charge of his life painfully evident in his failure to pick up the mail, he nevertheless seems to believe that his life will improve. Rejecting the vacuum cleaner, he claims, “I’m going to be leaving here soon” before the story concludes: “All right, [Bell] said, and he shut the door” (110). Echoing the belief that news of a job opportunity “up north” is imminent (102), this prediction is severely undermined by the final paragraph’s imagery. Dark and raining, the natural atmosphere is traditionally associated in literature with difficulties and not their attenuation. More subtly, the door closed in the narrator’s face images his psychological and emotional imprisonment. When the narrator of “Collectors” says “I’m going to be leaving soon,” a contradictory, implied voice emerges. Possessing neither a car nor a telephone and self-defined as a “dead loss” (109), the narrator is shut off from others and going nowhere in life.

“Fat”

Unlike the narrators of “Night School” and “Collectors,” the waitress-narrator of “Fat” wants to understand her experience; indeed, the search for self-knowledge prompts her to tell the story of her telling a story to her friend, Rita. The narrator’s powers of communication and acumen are too limited, however, and she mis-reads the signs of her life, unwittingly narrating a tale of two people comparable in their helplessness.

The opening sentence establishes the waitress’s limited linguistic and cognitive abilities: “I am sitting over coffee and cigarets at my friend Rita’s and I am telling her about it” (3). The vague pronoun evokes a bit of mystery, captures a nuance of working-class speech, and subtly broadens the story’s thematic implications. Suggesting that “Fat” is about more than just a waitress serving an obese patron,¹ the vague it also foreshadows the waitress’s searching yet ultimately myopic vision. The opening also dubiously coordinates the place of the first narrative act (“I am sitting ... at my friend Rita’s”) with the narrative act itself (“I am telling her about it”). Since she recognizes nothing important about the place of narration, the waitress should subordinate this piece of information.

Not able to dismiss the patron as merely a fat man-“he is fat ... but that is not the whole story” (7)-the waitress feels sexual attraction, “so keyed up or something,” and knocks over his glass of water (4). More limpidly, her sexual response manifests itself in a fascination with his fingers: “I first notice the fingers. They look three times the size of a normal person’s fingers-long, thick, creamy fingers” (3). This attraction to the fingers, which evoke “an ideal penis” (Runyon 12), suggests not only an understandable desire for sexual pleasure but also a desire for a weapon to combat Rudy, the live-in lover who violates her with his penis. After serving the fat man, the waitress submits to quasi rape that evening: “I get into bed and move clear over to the edge and lie there on my stomach. But right away, as soon as he turns off the light and gets into bed, Rudy begins. I turn on my back and relax some, though it is against my will” (8). Relegating the sense of violation to a subordinate clause, the grammar of the third quoted sentence underscores the narrator’s pitiable lack of power and self-worth.

The waitress may perceive the fat man as sexually vibrant, but no evidence suggests that he possesses any special virility. In other ways, the fat man is associated with false signifiers of power. He speaks with the royal we, for instance, a mannerism that the waitress finds “strange” and impressive (3). She fails to perceive, however, that the royal we is a fat joke told by the fat man on himself. References to a prodigious Caesar salad and Denver, the patron’s hometown, also connote power ironically, for if the City and Emperor are associable with the high and mighty, the fat man confesses that he cannot control his eating: “we have not always eaten like this,” he says. “But there is no choice” (7).

Ewing Campbell asserts that there is “no question about” the “festive quality” of the fat man’s eating (RC 13). In fact, nothing is festive about his eating. According to Carver, “Poor people, disenfranchised people, they can never get enough to eat”; they “don’t have enough, or can’t get enough, of what they need to sustain them” (Alton 163). This observation holds true for the fat man, who, responding to the waitress’s statement, “I like to see a man eat and enjoy himself,” remarks: “I don’t know .... I guess that’s what you’d call it” (5), and then “puffs” (6). As conspicuous as the royal we, this emphasized verbal tick, this puffing, suggests the pressure coercing the fat man; he eats enormously because of compulsion, not pleasure.

The fat man eats two deserts, the first called the “Green Lantern Special” (6), a conspicuous name further highlighted by capitalization that may allude obliquely and comically to the green light that Jay Gatsby looks for outside Daisy Buchanan’s home. In one of the most famous passages of twentieth-century literature, Fitzgerald writes:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter-tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther .... And one fine morning-

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. (159)

Of course, the waitress makes no connection between her world and that of Fitzgerald’s novel. Nevertheless, she and the patron share the powerlessness implicit in the tide imagery that concludes The Great Gatsby; just as “we” cannot but be drawn to the past, the fat man cannot avoid the dinner table or the waitress, service to others. Moreover, while Gatsby vainly believed in a future of orgiastic bliss with Daisy, the fat man has his orgy; yet neither character’s penchant for green lights, real or edible, achieves pleasure. Gatsby’s idealized love for Daisy leads perhaps to his disillusionment and most certainly to his death; the fat man’s Green Lantern Special leads only to a second desert, a dish of vanilla ice cream, and to more puffing.

“I named a character Bud in one of the stories,” Carver remarked, “and someone told me it really must be short for Budweiser and the good times” (O’Connell 148). There’s a warning here against overreading. Although powerlessness and color link Carver’s and Fitzgerald’s texts, “Green Lantern Special” might not be an intentional allusion. Names are nevertheless crucial in “Fat,” as they are in many Carver stories. Carver names the minor characters: Rita, the narrator’s friend; Herb, the host; Leander, the busboy; Margo, Harriet, and Joanne, waitresses; and Rudy, the cook who lives with the narrator. Only the narrator and the fat man are unnamed. In several spaghetti westerns, Clint Eastwood plays a nameless man who is nothing if not powerful. As “Night School” and “Collectors” demonstrate, however, in Carver, to be without a name is to lack identity and power. By om1ttmg their names, Carver indicates the protagonists’ shared helplessness.

Upset by, if not recognizing, her oppression, the waitress unwittingly uses fatness as a psychological defense against quasi rape: “When he gets on me, I suddenly feel I am fat ... terrifically fat, so fat that Rudy is a tiny thing and hardly there at all” (8). According to Meyer, the “sense of power in the image of being so much bigger than Rudy ... clearly indicates a positive change for the narrator, who has been empowered by the fat man to break off her relationship with the insensitive cook” (RC 34). While Meyer correctly notes that the relationship is not over as “Fat” ends, he fails to consider that the story aligns obesity with the weakness of the patron’s inability to control his eating. Derived from the mis-perception of power in the fat man, the image of obesity during sexual relations indicates no more than a vain desire for strength. If knowledge empowers, moreover, the waitress receives little strength here: “I know now I was after something. But I don’t know what” (6). As with most of Carver’s narrators in the early and middle fiction, storytelling does little to clarify the source of discomfort or offer a remedy.

The narrator’s admitted depression in the conclusion further contradicts the idea that storytelling improves her life:

I feel depressed. But I won’t go into it with her [Rita]. I’ve already told her too much.
She sits there waiting, her dainty fingers poking her hair.
Waiting for what? I’d like to know.
It is August.
My life is going to change. I feel it. (8)

The it that the narrator “won’t go into” might refer to an affair between the cook and Margo, the “one who chases Rudy,” or to a pregnancy (4).² Perhaps Meyer believes that the it refers to a decision to leave Rudy. It is difficult, however, to reconcile the narrator’s supposed self-empowerment with her depression. If the prospect of freedom should bring a measure of joy, this depression suggests that she has not transcended the degradation of a relationship with a man who objectifies her and that she senses the ineffectuality of imagination as a defense. I say senses, wanting to avoid the fallacy of overstating what Carver characters understand.³ The early and middle figures seldom realize much about themselves or their worlds, and in this regard the waitress is typical.

As with “Fat”’s opening, grammar underscores the narrator’s sorry plight. As David Kaufmann observes, “paratactic sentence structure” is “integral”; “the inability to subordinate, to organize material in anything other than chronological order, gets folded back into a larger inability to conceptualize and articulate.” Observing the non sequiturs in the conclusion, Kaufmann asks: “how does one move from flat declaration about the month to the conviction that life is going to change?” (99). Suggesting a degree of mental impotence, the non sequiturs indicate the waitress’s likely inability to control her life. If she “has great expectations” (Berlant 165), moreover, she will have to do something to effect positive change; yet the declaration “My life is going to change” is essentially a passive construction (Nesset, “Love” 300-01). The parataxis, non sequiturs, and passive form all support the conclusion that the waitress suffers from “crypto-illumination” if she believes positive change is coming soon (Kaufmann 99). Even if she experienced a clear epiphany, however, the story does not align knowledge with freedom; the fat man is trapped, but knowing this does not ease his imprisonment. The waitress eats and eats but “can’t gain” (7); in this fact and in the fat man’s compulsion to eat, we see the shackles that some Carver figures may struggle against but not break.

“The Idea”

Gallagher observes that Carver’s “humor” is “a much overlooked element” (“Carver Country” 12). Cynthia Thompson-Rumple’s MA thesis on the subject notwithstanding, Carver’s bleak vision has greatly overshadowed his comic talent, though at least one critic believes that “most” of the stories “may seem less grave than humorously imaginative” (Eck 84). Carver’s comic talents are evident in superabundance in “The Idea,” “one of [his] wittiest stories” (Boxer and Phillips 77), as unreliable narration develops a humor that comes mainly at the narrator’s expense. Like the waitress in “Fat,” “The Idea”’s narrator cannot see the truth of her existence, but unlike the waitress, whose story engenders pathos, she appears ridiculous and ridiculed because of her obtuseness and hypocrisy.

During her evenings, the unnamed narrator sits in a dark kitchen spying on her neighbors. On the evening central to the story, a man darts alongside his house toward a lighted bedroom window to watch his wife undress. Excited, the narrator calls to her husband: “Vern, hurry up! He’s out there. You’d better hurry!” (17). While Vern gladly joins the peepshow, voyeurism does not lead, as it does tempora...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chronology of key Works
• Introduction
• Chapter One Reassessing Indeterminacy’s Importance: An Examination of the Unreliable Narrators in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
• Chapter Two “What’s in Alaska?”: Symbolic Significance in the Commonplace
• Chapter Three The Education of Ralph Wyman: The Epistemological Theme in “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?”
• Chapter Four Catatonic Realism? Further Analysis of Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
• Chapter Five Omission in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
• Chapter Six Excessive Authorial Control?: More Analysis of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
• Chapter Seven Isolation and Withdrawal: The Still Bleak Prospects for Carver’s Characters in Cathedral
• Chapter Eight Communication in the Final Stories
• Chapter Nine Raymond Carver’s Poetic Technique
• Chapter Ten A Thematic Guide to Carver’s Poetry
• Chapter Eleven Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index