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Raymond Carver
Teenage sexual frustration and repressed anger pervade Raymond Carver's short story "Nobody Said Anything." Although the bulk of the tale covers the narrator's playing hooky from school, the fishing expedition serves mainly as a dramatic and symbolic backdrop for his parents' marital problems. The story begins and ends with tense moments at home, during which mother and father fight furiously while neglecting their two children. The parents do not take their anger out on the kids through overt violence, but they nevertheless emotionally neglect their children, saying nothing to address their feelings. The adolescent narrator struggles to impress his parents, especially his father, by catching a monstrous fish. However, his quest for attention is thwarted and only results in his getting scolded. The fish anecdote serves as a means to indirectly address the narrator's pain; it is a convenient metaphor for divorce, and the disgusting imagery of the dead fish drives...
For example, she allows the narrator to stay home from school when he feigns being ill and instructs him to not watch television. However, when she sees that the boy has turned on the TV, she says nothing to reprimand him; she is too busy getting ready for work all "stirred up," (5). The father, on the other hand, remains a cold and distant figure throughout the story. The narrator only refers to him briefly, mainly through the medium of fishing, as he used to take the boys to Birch Creek. When the narrator sees the steelhead, he immediately thinks of catching it as a trophy to win back his father's affection. When neither parent is pleased with the sight of the carcass, the narrator nevertheless remains glad that he held "that half of him," the half of the fish…
Works Cited
Carver, Raymond. "Nobody Said Anything." In Where I'm Calling From. New York: Random House, 1988. p. 3-20.
Raymond Carver's short story "Cathedral" explores a number of different social and psychological issues including stereotyping and prejudice. When the blind male friend of the narrator's wife enters their home, issues related to self-esteem, sexuality, and racism also arise. The blind man, Robert, helps the narrator to "see," serving a symbolic function of enlightenment. Cannabis provides the means by which the two men bond on an emotional and intellectual level,
Ethos is emphasized by presenting Aylmer as a successful scientist who abandoned his career in order to stay with his wife. Pathos emerges at the time when Aylmer is unable to sleep at night thinking that his wife is almost perfect and that he could actually make her perfect by putting his experience to use. Logos takes place when Aylmer performs a series of successful tests and actually goes as
Robert lost his wife, he is blind, and he is forced to interact with a person that the narrator believes he feels attracted to. All of these problems seem to be unimportant for the man and this influences the narrator in acknowledging his personal misery. The narrator accepts that he is doomed to being miserable because he is unable to appreciate life and the privileges that nature provided him
Carver, "Cathedral" Despite its prominent placement in the title of the story, the cathedral in Raymond Carver's short story "Cathedral" takes quite a while to make its appearance. The story instead is about a marriage -- a husband and wife have a guest to dinner. Carver's story is narrated in the first person, from the perspective of the husband, so to some extent the symbolism of the story is constructed with
Raymond Carver When one is seeking a bright, cheerily optimistic view of the world one does not automatically turn to the works of Raymond Carver. The short story writer - whom many critics cite as being the greatest master of that form since Ernest Hemingway - filled his pages with anger and discontent, despair and loss, desperation and the demons of addiction. The overall tone of his work is certainly dark.
The beginning of the end being her attempted suicide, due to the fact that she felt disconnected from him, her first husband, and the world, as he was in the military and they had constantly moved away from human connections she had made. (Carver NP) Her second marriage, to the insular narrator, going to bed at different times, and he sitting up watching late night television in his insular