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Carver
Raymond Carver's greater maturity of symbolism and theme in "A Small, Good Thing," as opposed to "The Bath"
Both the short stories "The Bath" by Raymond Carver and "A Small, Good Thing," are tales about sudden, tragic and meaningless death. However, while superficially the two stories may revolve around similar themes and plot devices, the longer, latter tale of "A Small, Good, Thing," is ultimately the more thematically redemptive of the two and the more mature expression of a holistic philosophy about life and healing than is the more sparse and harsher "The Bath."
The similarities between the two tales on their surface in terms of literal meaning and plot seem obvious. Beyond the concrete events that the tales tell as they unfold, both stories concern the apparently arbitrary methods by which individuals are taken away from those who care for them. A child can die right before his birthday, despite the care the mother lavishes upon the preparations for the child's cake and party. The doctors in charge of the child's...
This presence of the cake allows the subsequent redemptive aspect of the end of the tale. The baking of the cake gives an added significance to both the life of the baker and the life of the mother who ordered the cake for her child. In the story of "The Bath," death comes without any intrinsic meaning or saving significance for the participants involved. However, by ordering a cake for her child, the mother of "A Small, Good Thing," creates a relationship, albeit initially a negative one, between herself and the baker of her child's birthday cake. As the boy struggles for life, the baker grows increasingly irate at the unpaid, stale cake.…
Raymond Carver's short story "Cathedral" explores a number of different social and psychological issues including stereotyping and prejudice. When the blind male friend of the narrator's wife enters their home, issues related to self-esteem, sexuality, and racism also arise. The blind man, Robert, helps the narrator to "see," serving a symbolic function of enlightenment. Cannabis provides the means by which the two men bond on an emotional and intellectual level,
Ethos is emphasized by presenting Aylmer as a successful scientist who abandoned his career in order to stay with his wife. Pathos emerges at the time when Aylmer is unable to sleep at night thinking that his wife is almost perfect and that he could actually make her perfect by putting his experience to use. Logos takes place when Aylmer performs a series of successful tests and actually goes as
Robert lost his wife, he is blind, and he is forced to interact with a person that the narrator believes he feels attracted to. All of these problems seem to be unimportant for the man and this influences the narrator in acknowledging his personal misery. The narrator accepts that he is doomed to being miserable because he is unable to appreciate life and the privileges that nature provided him
Carver, "Cathedral" Despite its prominent placement in the title of the story, the cathedral in Raymond Carver's short story "Cathedral" takes quite a while to make its appearance. The story instead is about a marriage -- a husband and wife have a guest to dinner. Carver's story is narrated in the first person, from the perspective of the husband, so to some extent the symbolism of the story is constructed with
Raymond Carver When one is seeking a bright, cheerily optimistic view of the world one does not automatically turn to the works of Raymond Carver. The short story writer - whom many critics cite as being the greatest master of that form since Ernest Hemingway - filled his pages with anger and discontent, despair and loss, desperation and the demons of addiction. The overall tone of his work is certainly dark.
The beginning of the end being her attempted suicide, due to the fact that she felt disconnected from him, her first husband, and the world, as he was in the military and they had constantly moved away from human connections she had made. (Carver NP) Her second marriage, to the insular narrator, going to bed at different times, and he sitting up watching late night television in his insular