That, by invocation, by need, by wish, "this time next year, / this "Talking about a past as if it'd really happened," so "Nights without beginning that had noĮnd," as he comments in one of his poems, nights in which one is Wholeness patiently, fiercely, desperately.įor life, as Carver's stories pitilessly demonstrate, is always See the structure whole." The poems on the other hand seek this But Carver's stories usually do not allowĬatharsis, his characters do not escape from the middle of life "to The middle, cathartically granted through the structure and form of "in the middle," the aesthetic closure is a deliverance from past the End, so as to see the structure whole, a thing we cannotĭo from our spot of time in the middle" (8). Profoundly inscribed in literary narratives: "we project ourselves In The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode points out that endings are Reader to the novel is his hope, as he reads, to warm his own shiveringĮxistence by the warmth of another's death. Own life which we can never light in our own. The fire that devours another's life, the fire which warms our Thus, as readers ofĬarver's poetry we witness, as Benjamin observes in an Reviewer points to a characteristic quality of Carver's poetry: the Our aesthetic judgment: "Is it good in itself, or is it goodīecause we know the writer is dying?" (Lee 57). To the Waterfall whether such knowledge does not fundamentally determine Wonders in a recent review of Carver's posthumous volume A New Path This is true only for the retrospective reader whose knowledge of theĮnd of the story the protagonist must blindly fulfill. Stage of his life, be the man who died at the age of thirty-five. A man who dies at the age of thirty-five will always, at any In his celebrated essay, "The Storyteller," Walter Benjamin points out that it is from the ending backwards that everything acquires The timeless, as I will attempt to show, is inĬarver's poetry not only death but also, if tentatively, eternity. The poems thus become the occasion of a narrativeĬonsummation, of a discharge of narrative time into the quiescence of Recognition is the telos of Aristotle's tragic plot.įor Freud too, who based much of his psychoanalytic theory onĪristotle's theory of tragedy, a narrative serves but to postpone
"recognitions," their moments of crisis and of intense Or, one might say, the poems are the stories' Had hoped to find in his poems a deliverance from his stories. Poems are the metaphoric condensation of the stories, as if their author Reiterating the same social and autobiographical trauma,(3) then the
If the stories move along a metonymic process of repetition, always Stories, but structurally the poems perform a very different function. Carver's poems are intimately related to the
Nevertheless, there seems to be something consistent about Carver's The three volumes of poems that Raymond Carver has added to his largeĬollection of stories have received a very mixed response.(2) We have managed even to abbreviate stories. Today, we no longer work on that which we cannot abbreviate.
RAYMOND CARVER ERRAND ONLINE FREE
MLA style: "The very short stories of Raymond Carver." The Free Library.
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