Richard Carver's Everything Stuck To Him

As time goes by, one grows, experiences various scenarios in his or her life, and, one learns from his or her mistakes to not repeat them. This is the case for Richard Carver’s short story, “Everything Stuck To Him.” Carver’s short story is a frame story, which means that Carver introduces a story from the present and then shifts to tell a story from the past. The author reveals the personality of a character by indirect characterization. His choice of diction, minimalist style, symbolism, and his frame story impacts the meaning of the story because it involves the reader in the story and allows him or her to draw conclusions of the characters and the story itself. To begin with, Carver’s short story is a frame story -a story within a story-.

This impacts the story since it gives meaning and emotion to a character’s action or words. To begin with, the setting of the story, “in late November during a cold spell” symbolizes a new season and therefore change. The setting of the story symbolizes the change that the boy and the girl had, because “the baby came along” during the beginning of the new season. Furthermore, at the beginning of the inner story, Carver mentions that “one day the dentist finds out they were using his letterhead for their personal correspondence.” This type of symbolism is very important since the reader can infer from it that the characters themselves are struggling to find their own identity. While Carver never gives the boy and the girl any specific names, as the story unfolds, the narrator mentions three names. First, the narrator mentions that the boy “called an old hunting friend of his father’s. Carl.” He later mentions to his wife that he and Carl will go hunting later and that he will be back “Probably around noon... But maybe as late as six o’clock.” This symbolizes that the boy is still trying to live the life he had before, even though he is now married and has a baby. After the wife reassures his husband that the baby and she can manage the time without him, he tells him that when he gets back they can go visit his sister, Sally. The narrator then immediately continues to say that “the boy was a little in love with Sally. Just as he was in love with Betsy” who was also a sister of his wife. Carver uses this to represent the lack of maturity and compromise that the boy and the girl have towards each other. Lastly, towards the end of the story, the boy and the girl have a fight because the boy wants to go out hunting with Carl even though the baby might be sick. After his wife tells him to choose between hunting or his family, “the boy took up his hunting gear and went outside. He started the car. He went around to