Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, on May 25, 1938, and grew up in Yakima, Washington. His father, a skilled sawmill worker from Arkansas, was a fisherman and a heavy drinker too. Carver? s mother worked as a waitress and a retail clerk. Raymond Carver was educated at local schools in Yakima.
He had two children during his first marriage named Christine La Rae and Vance Lindsay . Carver started his writing development attending a creative writing course taught by the novelist John Gardner, who became his mentor and one of the major influence on Carver's life and career.He continued his studies first at Chico State University and then at Humboldt State College in Arcata, California. In 1979 Carver started a new relationship with Tess Gallagher until the end of his life fighting with his problems of alcoholism and drugs. He married Gallagher in 1988 in Reno, Nevada. Six weeks later, on August 2, 1988, Carver died in Port Angeles, Washington, from lung cancer at the age of 50.
In the same year, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.Raymond Clevie Carver was a major writer of the late 20th century and a major force in the revitalization of the American short story in literature in the 1980s. Carver’s work reflects two distinct periods in his life. His early work is mainly about people in desperate and uncontrollable situations, often putting his own experiences with poverty, alcohol, and divorce. His later works demonstrate what is considered his second life, which began when he took his last drink.
As a result, he became more optimistic in his literary works due to his second chance at love in his second marriage.Carver experienced many hardships during his lifetime and it is reflected in his literary works, sometimes labeled as autobiographical writer. For that reason in an interview made by Mona Simpson and Lewis Buzbee, Carver said: “A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best. ” He was completely aware that his work was based in his life but he clarified that they are not accurate narrations of his personal experiences.
Most of the Carver’s Works are based on his lifetime, it is one of his characteristic as a writer but we cannot talk about Carver? s style without take into account Dirty Realism. This literary movement “Dirty Realism” was a school of writing that became to be popular in the 1980s due to a group of writers such as Carver who began to writing about middle-class characters and the disappointments, heartbreaks, and harsh realities of their ordinary lives. This term was coin for the first time by Bill Buford on Granta magazine to define a North American literary movement .He explained that: "Dirty realism is the fiction of a new generation of American authors. They write about the belly-side of contemporary life – a deserted husband, an unwed mother, a car thief, a pickpocket, a drug addict – but they write about it with a disturbing detachment, at times verging on comedy.
Understated, ironic, sometimes savage, but insistently compassionate, these stories constitute a new voice in fiction. "(Bulford, “Granta 8: Dirty Realism”) Carver as one of the most prominent representatives of this movement develops in their work issues related with middle class and harsh realities.Self detachment is a common theme used by Carver to characterize some of his main characters in his short stories. Good examples of self detachment can be found in his short stories “Cathedral ” and “Fever” . The narrator in "Cathedral" freely admits that he is unable to connect to his wife anymore and his own relationship neither. In the same way In "Fever," the protagonist, Carlyle, enjoy a superficial relationship with a woman to hide his heartbreak feelings and his connection with real world.
In all two stories, the main male protagonist is presented as being unable to connect with those around him.In this present response we are going to study closely two of Carver? s short stories, “Cathedral” and “Fever” focused on self detachment in the main characters. Firstly, we are going to analyze the possible causes of the main character? s detachment, the circumstances, feelings, and emotional trauma that cause their disconnection of the world. At second place, we are going to study how the main characters handle their problems unplugging themselves from the reality, using drugs, alcohol, sex, and even apathetic attitudes as the way they have chosen to face their problem.And the last but not least, we are going to explore the importance of the acceptance and epiphany inside Carvers short stories finals, the moral and the messages they leave and the effect that the author wants to achieve with this elements.
Life’s Struggles as the Main Factor of Reality’s Disconnection Deals with life’s struggles could be a nightmare depending to the circumstances in which we are involve. Undoubtedly, life is full of struggles, proofs, and obstacles that make us take decisions to handle it. We are confronted with the need to make decisions amongst various choices every day of our lives.Basically, we have two options to handle our life’s problems, the first one is facing the problems to overcome them and the second one is runaway and let them ruin our life. In the situations that Carver show us in his short stories’ plots, we can see how the main characters in some way take the decision to ignore their problems, to runaway, abandoning in somehow his emotional and psychological reality. This behavior is colloquially known as emotional detachment, and to continue our analysis in Carver’s work is essential to know this term.
So, is important take into account that emotional detachment disorder is not a term used for medical purposes, according to the American Psychiatric Association: “the term is understood to reference the documented disorder known as "attachment disorder. " Attachment disorder describes the negative effects in the mood, behavior or social relationships of an individual who failed to form normal attachments to his or her parents or other primary caregivers in early childhood. The individual is not able to connect emotionally with others, often as a result of trauma or childhood abuse or neglect.Individuals who suffer from attachment disorder relate to others on a purely intellectual level, without experiencing empathy. They lack the emotional tools to create positive relationships with others, and they suffer from extreme loneliness, isolation and depression”(American psychiatric Association: “Emotional Detachment”) According to the term attachment disorder given b the American Psychiatric Association, this emotional problem is what we can see in the main character’s personalities. Even though, their childhood are not reflected in the short stories in order to assume that they had suffered some abuse in their early times, but we can infer that these disorders have been cause for other reasons that we can appreciate inside the short stories, to be more precise, caused by traumas related with relationships, and heartbreaks.
In the first story “Cathedral” we can notice that the narrator who is also the protagonist of the story is a narcissistic character who does not has empathy with his wife, and chooses to ignore his marital shortcomings rather than confront them in order to move on.The detachment disorder could be caused for his relationship’s problems as we can see in the follow example: “When we first started going out together, she showed me the poem. In the poem, he recalled his fingers and the way they had moved around over her face. In the poem she talked about what she felt at the time, about what went though her mind when the blind man touched her nose and lips. I can remember I didn’t think much of the poem.
Of course I didn? t tell her that. ” (Carver, 2656). The root of the problem probably started from the first date they had. In this part we can see the cause of the problem and its effect.In this date as we can notice, the girl is describing a very close emotional experience that she had with another man; obviously, it is not an easy task listen to the person who you are very interesting talking in that way about another person. This is probably the cause of the protagonist behavior.
From this moment the protagonist is forced to take actions, is when we distinguish that he decides to ignore the problem and continue with his relationship carry on with all this emotional dissatisfactions, and his detachment disorder starts its development throughout the story.Following the same track of ideas related with relationships, we have other problems like heartbreaks, marital separations and divorces that can cause serious emotional traumas and may result in detachment disorders. Carver in his story titled “Fever” show us the main character as a depress man unable to forget his ex-wife and move on, hiding his emotional reality, focusing in his children’s care, drinking and having a new relationship, that show us proof of what we colloquially know as emotional detachment.In the next part of the story Carver drive us inside the protagonist thoughts. “And while they’d slept, he had wandered the rooms of his house with a glass in his hand, telling himself that, yes, sooner or later, Eileen would come back. In the next breathe, he would say, “I never want to see your face.
again. I? ll never forgive you for this, you crazy bitch”. Then, a minute later, “Comeback sweetheart, please. I love you and need you.
The kids need you, too. ” (Carver, 166).The thoughts of Mr. Carlyle, the protagonist, is a reflect of his messy emotional state caused by his divorce, which is the origin of his emotional trauma, what it is at the same time what takes him away from his reality. The Protagonist of The Stories Logging Out Reality Logging out from reality is an idea that everyone in some point of our life have considered as the best solution to the life? s struggles. It Is a temptation that haunts us in our minds and it is impossible break out so easily.
It gives us the option of an easier and shorter way to escape our problems, but does not ensures a complete solution of them, leaving open gaps to develop serious emotional disorders that would change our life? s perspective and therefore our life style drastically. These temptations of disconnection with reality make the characters of the short stories to fall under their influence, taking this alternative pathway as a manner to hide their problems and turning as a lifestyle.It is important to know that Carver’s works are replete of male characters who are unable to connect with their environment and even with themselves. So, in the short stories we are analyzing we are going to see how the characters avoid their problems using some elements that Carver uses masterfully to stand reality’s way-out.
In “Cathedral” some of the elements that the protagonists and other characters use to distort his reality are: Alcohol, cigarettes and marijuana. The physical act of preparing and consuming drinks gives the story rhythm and weaves the narrative together.Before every action in the story, someone prepares a drink or sips from a drink. When the wife tries to kill herself, for example, she drinks a bottle of gin.
Before the narrator begins listening to one of Robert’s tapes, he makes drinks. When his wife tells him about Beulah, he drinks. When he waits for her and Robert to come home from the train station, he drinks. During the evening, the three of them drink constantly.
Also, as the drinking continues into the night, compounded by cigarettes and marijuana “I didn’t want to be left alone with the blind man.I asked him if he wanted another drink, and he said sure. Then I asked him, if he wanted to smoke some dope with me” (Carver 2660). These elements usually are preceded or accompanied by an unpleasant event as we can notice that the narrator does not want to deal with an unwanted company. The story takes on a dreamy tone, with meaning lurking behind every corner but never quite clearly in focus what reflects the disconnection of the narrator’s reality. Considering the evidence, we can deduce that Carver uses these elements to emphasize the emotional detachment of the narrator.
On the other hand, we have “Fever” in which the present of alcohol is not as strong but it is noted also as a way of draining emotions and as symbol of disconnection of reality. “And while they’d slept, he had wandered the rooms of his house with a glass in his hand, telling himself that , yes, sooner or later, Eileen would come back” (Carver 166). In this part we can notice that the protagonist does not accept his divorce as his reality and once again the alcohol is the bridge to create his utopia, in this case imagining that his ex-wife will come back.Not only emotional detachment but physical detachment is another kind of disorder that also reflects psychological and mental instability resulting from the attachment disorder. It consists basically in distance yourself from others, and feel the necessity of being alone. This kind of detachment is clearly reflected on the protagonist behavior that we can see in the next extract of the short story “After Eileen had left for California, Carlyle spent every waking minute for the first month with his children”(Carver 166).
What is telling us that he was not in contact with nobody else except his children to distract himself from his emotional reality. In the next lines there is another evidence of his physical detachment: “This was a period when he didn’t think he would be seeing any woman for a long time, if ever” (Carver 166). At least for a month the protagonist was unable to think about having a new relationship or even has sex with another woman, what is another proof of his isolation, his physical detachment and his disconnection with his reality.
