Experiencing Closure: A Study On The Ending Of Raymond Carver's Short Fiction

The 1970-80s witnessed a renaissance of short fiction in America, one main reason for which was the appearance of a new generation of writers such as Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, Ann Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason and Mary Robison. Among these writers, widely recognized as "minimalists", Raymond Carver stood out most conspicuously, who was hailed as the most important short fiction writer in America ever since Ernest Hemingway.During his 25-year-long writing career, Carver published 65 short stories in 5 separate collections. These stories differ in many ways, but they share, to more or less degrees, features of Minimalism. With the advent of the 21^st century, there has been extensive study of Carver in international academia, but unfortunately, Carver has not received much critical attention here in China.As Carver wrote stories for communication, this paper draws upon the rhetorical narrative theory of the "Chicago School" and focuses on how the endings of Carver's short fiction determine, incur or defer the reader's experience of closure. This theory looks at narrative as communication between the author and the reader through telling, which is a multi-leveled and multi-dimensional process involving all the judgments and responses the reader has about the narrative. Taking this framework as the point of departure, the paper examines how the reader experiences Carver's four types of ending, namely, the closed ending, the closed-story-but-open-discourse ending, the open-story-but-closed-discourse ending and open-story-and-open-discourse ending. The "open story ending" is defined as one that "leaves at least one major conflict unresolved" while the "open discourse ending" as one that "calls for the cognitive effort on the reader's part in order to communicate with the implied author or destroys the communication however hard the reader tries".Through examinations and analysis, we find that: 1) Most of Carver's stories are open-ended, on the story level, or discourse level, or both. Even those apparently closed endings are open in one way or another; 2) There is no epiphanic moment for most of Carver's characters at the end of his stories. In some rare cases, the characters do realize something, but the revelation is either unclear or ill-grounded; 3) Carver tends to employ the focalization of his characters and seldom, if ever, passes judgments on them. Consequently, coming to the end of his stories, the reader is still unable to pass ethical judgments upon the characters and their actions. This "playing dumb" helps create the sense of menace Carver favors, but like in "The Bath", this strategy sacrifices narrative credibility and thus destroys the intended reading effects.A Comparative reading of "Shiloh" by Bobbie Ann Mason, another important Minimalist writer, suggests that the disbelief in "grand narrative" is the fundamental reason for the open-endedness of Minimalist stories. This disbelief, in turn, has much to do with the "downbeat mood" that permeated through the U.S. in 1970-80s. Thus, the open-endedness employed by Raymond Carver and other Minimalist writers is not just a matter of narrative strategy, it is also a matter of historical choice.