Raymond Carver: Collected Stories Literary Elements

Short stories/Minimalist fiction

Various, but overwhelmingly taking place within a claustrophobic (either physically or emotionally) middle-class or working class town or suburb.

Various, but with a heavy reliance on first-person narrators. Even when the narrator is written in the third-person, however, it has the relaxed conversational “feel” of a first-person perspective.

Generally speaking, the tone and mood of a typical Carver story is emotionally detached and often intellectually elusive. The mood varies from story to story, but almost always seems suggestive that something more significant is going on beneath the surface than it seems.

Protagonist: Average everyday people finding themselves in non-extraordinary circumstances. Antagonist: More often than the first-person narrator or, in stories written from the third-person, the protagonist winds up being their own worst enemy.

The conflict within a first-person narrative is more often than not an internal one taking place within the narrator, though it often is not directly addressed. Otherwise, the conflict is likely to be domestic in nature pitting romantic partners against each other.

One of the defining aspects of a Carver story is that they do not reach a climax. Most of his stories simply come to an end.

The opening paragraph of “Popular Mechanics” is often used as an example of well-constructed foreshadowing: “Early that day the weather turned and the snow was melting into dirty water. Streaks of it ran down from the little shoulder-high window that faced the backyard. Cars slushed by on the street outside, where it was getting dark. But it was getting dark on the inside too.”

Carver’s resistance to climactic endings means that almost all his stories end on a note of understatement. Few carry quite the impact of the understated shock which end “Tell the Women We’re Going.” “He never knew what Jerry wanted. But it started and ended with a rock. Jerry used the same rock on both girls, first on the girl called Sharon and then on the one that was supposed to be Bill's.”

“I finished the chapter where Tars Tarkas falls for a green woman, only to see her get her head chopped off the next morning by this jealous brother-in-law. It was about the fifth time I had read it.” This is a follow-up to an earlier reference by the narrator that he is reading The Princess of Mars. That this scene is a favorite makes the reference also an allusion to the psychology of his confused and complex feelings toward his mother.

Probably the most famous use of imagery in a Carver story is the moment in “Cathedral” when the narrator actually wonders aloud whether he can successfully convey visual imagery of the title structures on the television screen to a blind man in the room: “To begin with, they're very tall. They reach way up. Up and up. Toward the sky. They're so big, some of them, they have to have these supports. To help hold them up, so to speak. These supports are called buttresses. They remind me of viaducts, for some reason.”

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“Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit” is really a very short story that is all about drawing parallels between the narrator and the title character. Appropriately, it also includes a paragraph that is an example of parallelism: “He told Melody he'd worked on the moon shots. He told my daughter he was close friends with the astronauts. He told her he was going to introduce her to the astronauts as soon as they came to town.”

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"But we had things in common, Ross and me, which was more than just the same woman. For example, he couldn't fix the TV when it went crazy and we lost the picture. I couldn't fix it either.” This is a creative example of personification in which the shared inability to get a clear image on the TV personifies the shared inability of both men to regain the clear picture of their lives which has been lost over the years.