In his short story, “Little Things,” Raymond Carver uses a mixture of imagery and symbolism to argue that the main characters of his story do not have their child’s best interests at heart and, therefore, do notgh deserve the child. Its similarity to the well-known Bible story of Solomon’s choice also helps Carver make his point. In the story, King Solomon is presented with a child and two women whom both claim that they are this child’s real mother. Solomon asks for a sword and says he will cut the child in half and give each woman an even portion of the child. One woman eagerly agrees, while the other woman cries out and begs the king to stop and just give the child to the other woman instead. In that manner, King Solomon decides that the woman who cried out was the child’s true mother because she put the pain that the child would endure above her own pain of losing her child. Carver writes, “In this …show more content…
He may be the high priest of minimalism, the genre currently so much in vogue in the writing departments, but neither in style nor subject manner does he conform to conventional definitions of the literary. His prose is sparse, terse, devoid of showy effects, stripped clean of all but the most inescapable adjectives and verbs; his subject is the daily life of the American lower middle class – the flip side, as it were, of the American dream.
Yardley’s argument that Carver’s writing is “stripped clean of all but the most inescapable adjectives and verbs” is entirely true. In “Little Things,” Carver does not bog the reader down with such details as the characters’ names or backgrounds. Instead he describes only a brief snapshot in these characters’ lives. This allows the reader to draw their own conclusions based solely on the image he creates in their minds of this one situation at this one point in