This essay examines three short stories written by contemporary American writer Raymond Carver through word clouds generated by the online data visualization tool voyant. The stories “Cathedral”, “So Much Water so Close to Home”, and “What we Talk About When we Talk About Love” are each shorter than six thousand five hundred words. Every story features at least one husband and wife duo. I will try to look for themes that capture complicated relationship progressions coupled with introspection of the first person narrator and dialogical storytelling that I have found to be common themes in these short stories. The following paragraphs feature a short summarization of the word cloud results and individual commentaries based those results. Cathedral …show more content…
The word cloud with stop words in place (See Appendix, Figure 2) appropriately suggests two of the three most prominent characters in the story. The words ‘blind’ and ‘man’ have almost equal number of occurrences with eighty and seventy three words respectively. The “Keywords in Context” window (See appendix, Figure 3) of voyant shows us that these two words are used simultaneously by the narrator suggesting a fixation on this “blind man” character. The word “wife” occurs forty-two times and words like “she” and “her” lead us to believe that a “wife” character is also under scrutiny in the story. One of the only names that appear in this word cloud is Robert and there are no further clues on who this might be or what his significance is to the story. An underlying theme of observation is evident as words like looked, know, listen, thought, eyes are occurring …show more content…
However, such an observation would be false because the story is told by a female first person narrator. It is also interesting to note that the theme of observation and speculation returns in this word cloud including words like “know”, “look”, “looks”, “think”, “hear” and “heard” featuring in the word cloud. As its title suggests, water is a focus of the story with metaphorical undertones and although the word water only occurs four times in this story, words subtly remind one of water like “drank”, “river”, “fish” and “marine” are mentioned multiple