Rhetorical Analysis Of Everything Stuck To Him By Raymond Carver

Everything Stuck to Him Rhetorical Analysis Some messes are more difficult to clean up than others. In Raymond Carver’s “Everything Stuck to Him,” a frame story, or a story within a story, the narrator reflects on an incident in his family’s past when he made a mess of his breakfast, and readers are left to wonder if he also made a mess of his marriage. Carver tells the frame story of a man’s life using literary devices that help readers convey a theme. The author conveys a deeper meaning throughout the short story by using diction, minimalist style, and symbolism.
Firstly, Carver uses diction to help the development of the short story. When the man is telling the girl a story from when she was a baby, he does not emphasis that he is “the boy.” Rather, he keeps it indirect and lacks detail throughout the internal story. “They were kids themselves, but they were crazy in love, this eighteen-year-old boy and this seventeen-year old girl when they married. Not all that long afterwards they had a daughter…” (Carver). Keeping the

“The baby came along in late November during a cold spell that just happened to coincide with the peak of the waterfowl season” (Carver). The transition from fall to winter not only describes the weather, but it symbolizes a rough spot in the couple’s marriage. Another example of symbolism is in the internal story when the boy spills his sticky syrup on himself. “He spread butter and poured syrup. But when he started to cut, he turned the plate into his lap… the boy looked down at himself, at everything stuck to his underwear” (Carver). Carver includes this symbolism because the syrup is both literal and figurative. Although the boy actually spills syrup on himself, the syrup symbolizes the mess he made of his marriage and how all the memories are “stuck” to him. Carver’s use of symbolism helps create a deeper meaning to the text in the short