Ray Carver and his literary contributions

¶ … Raymond Carver's "Gazebo" to "what we talk about when we talk about love"

The entire theme is very much an existentialist one with both stories alluding to the meaninglessness of love, lust, alcoholism, boredom, and, running through it all, the futility of everything. Life equals death -- is perhaps even more than death, for whilst death denotes passivity and absence of negativity, life is full of these destructive elements of infidelity, despair, meaninglessness, and torpor.

In Raymond Carver's "Gazebo," Duane and Holly, managers of a motel, are two aimless characters that, at one time, had higher dreams for their life. Duane, at least, is a college graduate, and from both Duane and Holly's action and speech, we get a clear impression that both feel cheated by their existence. They don't seem to do much. They receive free lodging and utilities and a small stipend. And both are hankering for more.

Duane cannot forget his previous affair with a Hispanic maid (aimless thoguh it was), and Holly cannot reawaken Duane's former passion for her, nor can she forget that he cheated on her. In an attempt to reignite his passion, she goes so far as to pour whisky on his stomach and lick it off. She fails to stimulate his passion and accuses him of killing her. Here, as so often in the story, whiskey, infidelity, and death are integrated.

Whiskey is a prominent piece in the story. When the pair want to settle things, they do it by holing themselves up in a room with a bottle of whisky. Whiskey, in fact, is prominent in "What we talk about when we talk about love" too.

There, the characters, bored and drift less, soak themselves in the liquid. "What we talk about when we talk about love" -- taking those words literally and extracting them form the title - seem, in Carver's world, to indicate whiskey and emptiness. Love, he seems to infer, is transient, and, just like life itself, contrary to how romantics paint it. Both 'life' and 'love' -- abundantly glorified by poets and moralists as beautiful, inspirational, transcendental, and so forth - are really deceptive, meaningless, transitory, and false.

This is most abundantly demonstrated in "What we talk about..." There, the four characters sit around the kitchen table and, drinking gin, discuss love. Mel, the cardiologist, insists that true love represents spiritual love. Terri, his wife, recalls the physical abuse of her ex-husband and defines that as love. Mel, in turn, confesses his fantasy of murdering his ex-wife due to her financial dependence on him. Nick, the narrator, and Laura, new lovers, believe that nothing can destruct their love. The story concludes by Mel reminiscing about an elderly couple injured in a car crash whom he attended in the hospital. Still in love after many years, their sole wish was to see each other. Affected by this story, the characters muse on the impermanence of love, and down their gin with a different perspective of their marriage.