They Re Not Your Husband Analysis

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Raymond Carver’s story: They’re Not Your Husband, was written in the early 1970s in the US. This reflects to the text, where urban problems in the late modern society, like 24/7 working hours and obesity are introduced to us immediately. Those issues were not in the same way relevant to European countries in the 1970s. The composition reveals that the author of the text wrote it as a short story, and so does the very few characters. It is also clear that this is a text written by Raymond Carver, mainly because the story is based on a lower middle-class relationship in the US, which is a typical subject for the dear Mr. Carver. The social conditions are clear from the start, when we are introduced to the two main characters, whereas the main dispute in the story comes clear much later on in the text. The aforementioned settings are crucial to the story, because the whole plot is based on the lower class in the US, and its difficulties. Moving on to the characters, I would like to put Earl and Doreen in …show more content…

In the beginning of the story Earl seems like a decent husband, trying to support his wife while she is at work. Nevertheless, his persona changes after the first page. He is portrayed as a control freak who loses all of his control, and in his attempt to regain it, he becomes a bit of a maniac. Humiliating comments and embarrassing acts towards his wife quickly makes him an exasperated character, which is also connected to all of the minor details in the story. Earl is fore an example presented to us as a salesperson, though if we look at the story implicitly, he quits his search for employment during his change in character. What is also mentioned both in and between the lines later on in the text, is that he seems not care about anything, with the only exception of his wife’s physical appearance. Throughout the whole story, Earl becomes more and more of a languishing