What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Raymond Carver

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Mel says that he witnessed true love during his time at the hospital. A drunk driver crashed into an older couple, almost killing both of them. They survived, but their injuries were so bad they were separated and put in casts. The husband told Mel that he was depressed because he couldn't see his wife out of his cast. Mel asserts that that's true love. All poems are love poems, Carver’s narrator observes in his poem For Semra,With Martial Vigor and obviously not all but most poems in this collection consider love. The simple pleasures of love. The sweet comfort of holding hands giving strength to endure time consuming us ( Through the Boughs). The delight of watching the beloved dancing a minuet ( The Minuet), or the reminiscence of that enchantment emanating from the eye of the painter who has lost his muse and wife ( Bonnard’s Nudes). Hips, thighs and loosened hair celebrating in the dark sensuality of liberty ( This Word Love). The traces on a lip left after a wild night( Yesterday). The bittersweetness of longing and hope, the pain of losing love ( Still Looking Out of Number One), of loss and grief, of missing, of transience, evoking tenderness and melancholy without threading onto mawkish ground, conjuring up a quiet night where a couple unobtrusively breaths together closing the day in the intimacy of their home ( The Best Time of the Day), or seizing the simple joy and warm thoughts when coming home where the one you love welcomes you ( Waiting): For an answer, I took Laura’s hand and raised it to my lips. I made a big production out of kissing her hand. Everyone was amused.

The story takes place one afternoon and evening when the four of them are at Mel’s house, sitting around his kitchen table and drinking cheap gin with lime wedges. Ed is not physically present in the story, but he encompasses Terri's entire view on love. Although he was abusive and threatened to kill both Terri and Mel, Terri thinks that he only did it out of love. Ed ultimately commits suicide when he realizes Terri has moved on. MarjorieRaymond Carver is the writer who uses minimalism in his writing style to set up the tone of the story from the very beginning. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” by Carver explores the subject of love. Love is a word that one hears in everyday life. Talking about love, people mean different things. People talk about loving their parents, cars, pets, movies, books, ice cream, children, spouses, and so forth. However, love is different in each instance, and the concept of love puzzles many people. In contemporary pop culture, the word love has been overused, and it is not easy to tell what the word actually means. Love means different things to different people. The essay shall examine major themes and main characters of the story and their attitude to love and relationships. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Summary The prevalence of divorce helps to situate the short story in the 1970s/1980s, pixabay. "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" Summary Perhaps the problem is that every way in which I’d like to describe the depth of these stories simply comes off as an unspeakably repetitive cliché that almost makes me shudder. It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power.”

The most treacherous word in this prolific Mad Lib is “we.” Who is this “we” doing the talking about something? Unless the author defines this group—and her position within it—all she offers is a universalizing perspective. In using these titles, authors and publishers suggest that a wide discourse’s “true” meaning requires redefinition. Only the author—who is within the discourse’s “we” but somehow also at a better vantage point than everyone else—has the authority to define the terms of this conversation. She offers a diagnosis of the current conversation and prescribes a new way of doing things. Yet, in cloaking herself in the popular “we,” rather than authorial “I,” the author also lends herself a great deal of power in anonymity. The exception here is Murakami, who explicitly set out to describe his own relationship to running, rather than the activity in general in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir. By using “I” instead of “we,” he clearly defines his own relationship to the material.

Carver's original draft of the story "Beginners" was heavily edited by Gordon Lish, who cut out nearly half of Carver's story, adding in details of his own. Carver's original draft, released by his widow Tess Gallagher and published [6] in a December 2007 issue of the New Yorker, reveals the extensive edits. For instance, the character Mel was originally named Herb, and the abusive boyfriend, renamed Ed by Lish, was originally named Carl. Additionally, Herb's story about the old couple was cut nearly in half, with Lish removing the story of the old couple's home life, love, and reunion in the hospital. In Carver's original version, the two had separate rooms, which caused them to pine for each other and eventually led to a scene when they met again. Lish removed all of this, rewrote the couple into the same room, but in body casts that prevented them from seeing each other, and then explained the old man's distress thus: I mean, the accident was one thing, but it wasn't everything. I'd get up to his mouth-hole, you know, and he'd say no, it wasn't the accident exactly but it was because he couldn't see her through the eye-holes. He said that that was making him feel so bad. Can you imagine? I'm telling you, the man's heart was breaking because he couldn't turn his goddamn head and 'see' his goddamn wife."

Ed seems to be dependent on Terri and feels very vulnerable when she is away, hence he attempted suicide. The kind of love they had was unhealthy. When a person becomes too dependent on another and very possessive, the results can be disastrous, and today, many homicides have been committed in the name of love. So what can we call the love that kills? Conclusion The major themes come down to the nature of love and communication and connection. The Nature of Love in "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"While reading this, I was also watching a young, first love disintegrate into fragments. I remember as a child, my grandmother always used to say “Ain’t love grand.” I found the lyrics to some old song from the 1920s, and I’m pretty certain this is the version she echoed. I used to believe her when she uttered those words. Well, it turns out love is a lot more complicated than “Just wait until you strike it, there’s really nothing like it.” It doesn’t necessarily get any easier with practice and experience either. Raymond Carver knew this. For the most part, his characters lead difficult lives. Lives torn apart by alcoholism, violence, infidelity, disease, and mere drudgery. How did these men and women plunge to such depths? Did the alcoholism precede the unhappiness or vice versa? Did boredom pave the way to infidelity? We don’t always know how they got there, but we certainly see the damaging aftermath of such destruction. Well, the husband was very depressed for the longest while. Even after he found out that his wife was going to pull through, he was still very depressed. Not about the accident, though. I mean, the accident was one thing, but it wasn’t everything. I’d get up to his mouth-hole, you know, and he’d say no, it wasn’t the accident exactly but it was because he couldn’t see her through his eye-holes. He said that was what was making him feel so bad. Can you imagine? I’m telling you, the man’s heart was breaking because he couldn’t turn his goddamn head and see his goddamn wife.” While Carver’s was the first famous one, titles like this have been enjoying a heyday in the past decade. In 2009, Haruki Murakami came out with What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir. He asked Tess Gallagher, Carver’s widow, for permission to use the title form. In 2011, The New Yorker featured Nathan Englander’s story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” which was reprinted in his 2013 collection of short stories of the same name. In a clever reprisal of Carver’s story, Englander substitutes Jewish identity for love as the topic of two couples’ drunken conversation.