No two readers would agree on what the story means, if anything. The story leaves a strong impression but an ambiguous one. The reader can feel it too but might be hard pressed to say what “it” is. She says that she herself feels “terrifically fat” she feels depressed, and finally ends by saying, “My life is going to change. After she goes home at night, she is still thinking about him. She says that she has never seen such a fat person in her life and is somewhat awestruck by his appearance, by his gracious manners, and by the amount of food that he can consume at one sitting. Carver frames his story by setting it in a restaurant and by describing the fat man from the point of view of a waitress. Throughout his career, Carver based stories and poems on people or incidents that he observed or scraps of conversation that he overheard these things seemed to serve as living metaphors or symbols with broader implications. It is little more than a character sketch nothing happens in the story. This was true of the early stories that Carver collected in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? A good example of Carver’s strengths and weaknesses is a short story in that volume titled “Fat.” FatĪs the title suggests, “Fat” is about a fat man.
One drawback is that it allows insecure writers to imply that they know more than they know and mean more than they are actually saying. The advantage and appeal of minimalism in literature is that it draws readers into the story by forcing them to conceptualize missing details. The spare, objective style that he admired in some of Hemingway’s short stories, such as “The Killers” and “Hills Like White Elephants,” was perfectly suited to Carver’s needs. It would have been inappropriate to write about simple people in an ornate style, and, furthermore, his limited education would have made it impossible for him to do so effectively. His lifelong experience had been with working-class people. Carver writes about divorce, infidelity, spiritual alienation, alcoholism, bankruptcy, rootlessness, and existential dread none of these afflictions is peculiar to the working class, and in fact, all were once more common to members of the higher social classes.Ĭarver was a minimalist by preference and by necessity. Although it is true that most of Carver’s characters belong to the working class, their problems are universal. Even when the critic is sympathetic, this dual categorization tends to stigmatize Carver as a minor artist writing little stories about little people. Nearly everything written about Raymond Carver (– August 2, 1988) begins with two observations: He is a minimalist, and he writes about working-class people.
Analysis of Raymond Carver’s Short Stories
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