Research Paper on Raymond Carver

Research Paper on Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver was famous for his short fiction that was given the genre title of minimalist, and he was a working-class author. Raymond Carver’s work is a reflection of people’s day-to-day lives, such as connectivity, miscommunication, and communication. Most times, Raymond Carver is described as a minimalist writer because he extracts moments of modern-day American life in a spare expressed language and with a desolate viewpoint. Inherent in this classification is the concept that his stories do not have any transformative vision, in that they depict stories of losers and alcoholics as if they are blind, and have self-destructive behaviors which are matters of realistic fact and are not subject to variation through the insight stories provided to readers and characters. Raymond Carver has written several books such as “A New Path To the Waterfall,” “Beginners,” “All of Us,” among others. The early critics of Raymond Carver, specifically James Atlas, 1981 and Madison Bell, 1986, blamed him for flatness in language and artistic vision. Therefore, Carver is seen leaving his characters in quiet desperation lives (Saltzman 178-182)

The early life of Carver as a son of two working-class parents was a life of constant hardship because the alcoholism of his father took a toll on Carver’s family and gave him excellent insight of living in an inward-looking fashion every day. Carver married at an early age of 19, and he seemed to take his father’s lifestyle of alcoholism and low wage salaries that plagued his young family. Carver developed an interest in writing relatively late in life, and such interest was another destruction to his young family because he had to find a writing space.  At the same time, make his wife and children happy. Consequently, his young marriage ended in a divorce.

The start of Carver’s literary career was unrewarding, but productive because he traveled to several college campuses as he earned several degrees and also taught short lectures at that level. After separating from his wife, that was when his first work was published (Gelfant and Graver 187-188). Regardless of Carver’s accomplishments, his life in the late 1960s and early 1970s was pathetic and utterly frustrating. He later stated that he was looking for a place where he can write and also make his wife and two children happy. He also said that he never thought that he was asking for too much. However, his family did not find happiness. He continuously worked odd jobs and briefly taught at three campuses in the University of California. He also worked at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Carver was also declared bankrupt twice, and he was a heavy drinker, he was often hospitalized for acute alcoholism. As a result, Carver finally separated from his wife (Gelfant and Graver 188).

The works of Carver are genuine, and they are demonstrating the everyday challenges of men and women whose lives are not only what they wish them to be, but so narrow that they cannot dare to even want for what they would have had when young. The characters of Carver have abandoned the wishes of their childhood, career goals, relationships, and life goals that they can settle in. The work of Cathedral is an expression of the glimpses of ordinary people who may have an insight into the broader and more mysterious world.

Cathedral’s theme is to challenge insularity through first human interactions. Opening up to the world creates a new perspective.  Raymond Carver utilizes different elements to come up with a subject that gives the reader a perception that a storyteller is a hostile person who needs to change. Carver carefully uses narration, imagery, symbols, characterization, and other features so that the reader can comprehend the struggles of the narrator and what is viewed by people when they are open to new experiences.

It is clear that the works of the narrator are openly closed-minded and even to his loving wife, who he wished would look at him appreciatively, affectionately, however, seemed only to admire those who she perceives as being open. While the narrator is introduced to the long lost friend of his wife, whose name is Robert, he takes into consideration his appearance, perceiving him as a balding blind man in his mid-forties who is long-bearded. Nevertheless, his wife sees the man as though the man symbolizes her past, which was once open to all possibilities. The narrator then terms the condition as a strong sense of jealousy and the need for approval.

The narrator relates his rejection of Robert with his uneasiness about Robert’s blindness, which is a display of his insular lifestyle, his closed nature, and his helplessness to attempt new things and meet new people. At the beginning of the story, his wife has to persuade him to stay with Robert because he loves her, yet he is not familiar with Robert and does not care about Robert or even the fact that he was widowed recently. Furthermore, he also does not care that at some point, he moved his wife to thought and literature as she was trying to write a poem about the experience of having Robert, on the final day of her employment with him touching and memorizing her face. The work describes how, after the narrator’s wife retreats to sleep, Robert brings a mind-opening experience to the narrator by drawing to him a cathedral. The experience is an epiphany that is similar to the previous lesson which his wife had with Robert as he realizes the power of the connection between the man and himself, whom he always held on standby with rejection. This is in complete agreement with Nesset’s analysis of how collaborating with others brings individuals out of narrow-mindedness through significant and modest liberation. Nesset describes in terms that are less than minimalist on how Cathedral is different from other works of Carvers in that it shows an epiphany of connection between people.

From the Cathedral, there are more extreme types of narrow-mindedness from a self-inflicted limitation of a husband to a living room. A more striking factor in the tower than ever before is the figures of Carver sealing themselves off from the rest of the world, fencing out the intimidating forces in their lives even as they isolate themselves, withdrawing detrimentally into the oppressive inward self-enclosures. However, in correspondence to this new extreme of insularity, characters try to throw their trapping nets, and in a few occurrences, they seem to be successful. It is only in Cathedral that we get to observe the unusual instants of their movements, which is a procedure of opening up lives that are closed down, coming across in both the subjects and occasions of the stories and while in their telling, where self-disenfranchisement is portrayed even on the discourse stage, structurally, rhetorically or both (Nesset 116)

It is clear that the work strikes a chord with many because it is an aspect of continuous literary criticism.to some degree, Nesset is in agreement with Facknitz who makes observations in three works of Carver that human communication, experienced between characters has a healing power that can eventually alter the character’s lives. In Cathedral, Robert becomes a sort of guru, which is something that the narrator can share with his wife. However, the story only ends with the possibility as his wife awakes and asks what both of them are doing, and both of them calm her back to sleep. The reader is left with the impression that the shared experience of the two men may alter the life of the narrator and even the life he is sharing with his wife. Therefore, this creates a more peaceful existence that could probably save their marriage, thus preventing divorce, created by the profound insularity of the man and his inability to express the love he has for his wife. Early in the story, she is in doubt of his love for her, and he has nothing to say because she does not have anything to say to Robert concerning her love for the narrator. At the end of the work, there is a possibility of the new day with the narrator and having the ability to express his love, and possibly avoiding a disastrous divorce.