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Short Story Everything Stuck To Him By Raymond Carver

715 Words3 Pages

The truest things are best said simply. In the short story “Everything Stuck to Him”, Raymond Carver generates a neologistic view of a frame story. In the passage, a father is telling his daughter a story about a much simpler time when she was just an infant. Raymond Carver’s minimalist style, use of symbols, and method of characterization, all enhance the quality of his frame story. Carver is a minimalist writer, which means his sentences are devoid of elaborate details, explanations, or descriptive passages. His style enhances the story because even though he uses simple words, everything he says is significant, and there are never any words put to waste. The following quote is an example of the author’s minimalistic style: “...he stays by the window, remembering. They had laughed. They had leaned on each other and laughed until the tears had come...” This …show more content…

Indirect characterization is when an author shows the reader what a character is like through the character’s actions and reactions. The husband and wife in the frame story are depicted as very naive and immature children. Carver even refers to them as the boy and the girl. “They were kids themselves, but they were crazy in love… The boy and girl, husband and wife, father and mother…” The family lives under a dentist’s office, and the story references what seems a past issue where the naive couple gets caught using the dentist’s letterhead. There are multiple scenarios within the frame story that show the reader that the young couple were not mature enough to know how to keep their family going. The boy is impatient and still feels the urge to be young and free. However, the stubbornness of the girl convinces him that his responsibility is his family and nothing else. The indirect characterization in this story shows a lot about what each character’s personalities are, and helps the reader completely understand the character’s

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Carver highlights the narrator’s prejudice in the opening section of the story in order to reveal how the narrator’s bias against blind people in general leads to a preconceived negative opinion on Robert. From the outset, the narrator acknowledges his prejudice by mentioning that his “idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed” (Carver, 1). The narrator’s negative prejudice is not caused by knowing a blind man; rather, it is derived from an external factor, demonstrating how the narrator has formulated an opinion on people he has never met. Consequently, the narrator assumes that Robert will conform to the negative stereotype present in his mind, and is unpleased about Robert’s visit.

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The narrator then proceeds to show Robert what a cathedral looks like by taking his hand and drawing a cathedral on “a shopping bag with onion skins in the the bottom of the bag.” (Carver 110) . Through this bricolage, the narrator closes his eyes and has an epiphany, for in this moment where his eyes are closed, hands intertwined, he truly sees, and “ ‘It’s really something,” (Carver 135). It’s the minimalistic approach that prefaces this big event that really showcases the theme. Carver’s use of colloquial language, in creation of an increasingly relatable scene allows for the reader to empathize with the narrator, allowing for a much stronger impact when the epiphany occurs and the story’s theme has been

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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.

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