A Study On The Thematic Shift In Raymond Carver’s Short Fiction

Raymond Carver is highly acclaimed for sparking a renaissance of the American short story in the late twentieth century, and for giving voice to a group of underprivileged population, who before his time had not gained the adequate recognition in the cultural landscape of American literature. The minimalist style of Carver’s fiction has always been the focus of critics, despite Carver’s repeated denials of being labeled as a minimalist. In fact, Carver’s simple language is a disguise for the emotional violence. His concise interpretation of contemporary American life is thought-provoking and incisive.With a detailed text analysis of the stories in Carver’s three major short-story collections, namely, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and Cathedral, this thesis focuses on the study of the main themes running through his fiction and reaches a conclusion that there does exist a thematic shift in Carver’s fiction, which is from alienation to redemption. Although Raymond Carver’s America is helpless, clouded by pain and the loss of dream, it is not as fragile as it looks. Despite its barren economic vision, spiritual malaise, and emotional strife, these working class people still manage to survive and obtain redemption from their despair-ridden life.In Carver’s early fiction, these working-class characters are mostly lonely and desperate individuals suffering from alienation of the husband-wife relationship, alienation from the parent-child relationship, alienation of individual-community relationship, self-alienation, and alienation of the man-nature relationship. A bleak and pessimistic picture of the contemporary American society is portrayed in his early fiction. Nevertheless, bleakness is not the overwhelming vision of Carver’s fiction, considering there is a group of survivors who successfully reestablish their interpersonal relationships, regain their hope, and achieve their spiritual redemption from the abyss of despair in Cathedral. And this obvious thematic shift is explored from the perspective of the cultural interpretation at the end of this thesis.