Too close for comfort :: essays research papers

Too close for comfort Yet the similarity between these two stories raises some interesting questions about how we read Carver. That he is adored as few late-century American writers are is not news -- as blossoming points out theres almost a cult of Carver. Readers treasure not yet his taut, bleak, deeply moving short stories but the legend of his life, as hale unhappy, alcoholic, stifled by frustrating p everyplacety and heavyhearteddled with the overwhelming responsibilities of teenage parenthood ("My wife and I didnt have any youth" he told Simpson), Carvers unique talent didnt have room to develop until relatively late. His eventual merriment over adversity, a story of late, spectacular blooming against all odds, has wedded him a rare hold on his readers affection. Carver chronicled the lives of the lumpen toil and the demoralized white working class with a sensitivity and centre for detail unmatched in his contemporaries and, many would argue, his followers. He is ordinarily thought of as a truly American writer, perhaps stylistically indebted to Sherwood Anderson, Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway (he himself suggested the link to Hemingway in his book "Fires"), but in a sense sui generis -- a talented, sensitive soul who rose up out of the deadening laundromats and strip malls of the great, dreary American suburban wastelands and wrote beautiful, sad stories in clipped, stripped prose. The minimalism and domestic realism of his short stories do his work read actually differently from the cerebral literary styling of his contemporaries, the university-ensnared postmodernists. provided perhaps Carvers work wasnt as unfettered or as American (in his literary influences, at least) as all that. It seems that he read (and taught) the European modernists very carefully. Bloom says that, "Carver was a very literary writer and his work is full of echoes of other writers, some of them unintentional. Hes a derivative writer -- v astly overrated." Or, as Tobias Wolff wrote, admiringly, in the introduction to "The Best American rook Stories of 1994" The picture of Gabriel Conroy in James Joyces "The Dead" watching his wife Gretta on the stairway above him as she listens to a tragic ballad ... has become for me ... the very emblem of that final distance which a lifetime of domestic confederacy can never overcome. I wonder if there isnt an echo of this word picture in Raymond Carvers "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" when Ralph, returning from a walk on his honeymoon, sees his bride, Marian, "leaning motionless on her arms over the ironwork balustrade of their rented casita .