Too close for comfort :: essays research papers

excessively close for comfort Yet the similarity between these two stories raises round interesting questions ab step to the fore how we read Carver. That he is adored as fewer late-century Ameri fuck writers are is not news -- as Bloom points stunned theres almost a cult of Carver. Readers treasure not only his taut, bleak, deep moving short stories but the legend of his life, as well unhappy, alcoholic, conquer by frustrating p overty and saddled with the overwhelming responsibilities of teenage blood ("My wife and I didnt have any youth" he told Simpson), Carvers singular endowment didnt have room to develop until relatively late. His eventual triumph over adversity, a story of late, spectacular blooming against all odds, has given him a rare hold on his readers affection. Carver chronicled the lives of the lumpen proletariat and the vitiate white deviseing class with a sensitivity and eye for dot unmatched in his contemporaries and, many would argue, his follo wers. He is commonly fancy of as a truly American writer, maybe stylistically indebted(predicate) 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 made his melt down read truly differently from the cerebral literary styling of his contemporaries, the university-ensnared postmodernists. But 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 w riter -- immensely overrated." Or, as Tobias Wolff wrote, admiringly, in the introduction to "The Best American Short Stories of 1994" The range of Gabriel Conroy in James Joyces "The Dead" watching his wife Gretta on the staircase to a higher place him as she listens to a tragic ballad ... has become for me ... the very allegory of that final distance which a lifetime of domestic partnership can never overcome. I wonder if there isnt an echo of this image in Raymond Carvers "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" when Ralph, returning from a crack on his honeymoon, sees his bride, Marian, "leaning motionless on her arms over the ironwork handrail of their rented casita .