A Study On The Lack Of Individual Responsibility In Raymond Carver's Will You Please Be Quiet,Please?

Raymond Carver,a master of "dirty realism",chronicles the daily life of the"submerged population" against the backdrop of the 1960s' American society in his first short-story collection Will You Please Be Quiet,Please?With spare and terse language,Carver records an irresponsible generation in the history of the United States,when the society went through an unprecedentedly rapid rise of capital market,the biggest gap between the rich and the poor,and frequent social movements-The characters in the stories either live like parasites on their elderly parents due to their lousy credits and their unemployment,or use their body for trade after a family bankruptcy,or become heavy smokers and modern consumers though raised by nature,or make a confession to God with tobacco and alcohol,or refuse to communicate and resort to violence.After going through alcoholism and drug abuse,extramarital affairs and domestic violence,and unemployment and bankruptcy,the individuals living in Carverian country are extremely confused about their roles,thus failing to shoulder their corresponding responsibilities and trapped in existential predicament.Based on this logical premise,this thesis aims at exploring the reasons why Carver repeatedly depicts the image of the individuals with a lack of responsibility in his first short-story collection and digging out the essence of this phenomenon,the source of the author's creation as well as the values behind it.This thesis consists of six Chapters.The first Chapter briefly introduces Raymond Carver as well as the writing background,main content and writing features of his work Will You Please Be Quiet,Please?In addition,after reviewing and sorting out the previous and current researches on Carver's works abroad and identifying the insufficient domestic researches on Carver's early works,this chapter points out the significance of interpreting Carver's works by focusing on the lack of individual responsibility and briefly expounds the research approach of this thesis.Based on the creation era of this short-story collection as well as the focus on individual responsibility and existential predicament embodied in this work,Chapter two first defines the individual and individual responsibility from the perspective of existentialism,sorts out the phenomena of individuals' lack of responsibility toward themselves,family,society,and nature,and its subsequent consequences.From the third Chapter to the fifth Chapter,this thesis explores the psychological mechanism,social factors and philosophical thinking behind the individuals' lack of responsibility,locating them respectively in alienation,identity crisis and existential predicament.Alienated from the self,the social and the natural world,the characters living in Carverian country are the outsiders of the society,with the split selves feeling adrift and hopeless;going through permanent loss of occupational role,dissolution of traditional gender roles and disillusioned national identity,they suffer from role confusion,and a crisis of identity is imminent;in a modern world full of absurdity and uncertainty,they find no way to ask God for help and lose their religious beliefs,thus soul redemption and spiritual transcendence are no longer possible.Chapter 6 is the conclusion,summarizing the central points of this thesis,and pointing out the writing purposes as well as the social values behind Carver 's first short-story collection.Through the detailed description of the daily life of those irresponsible individuals,Carver 's first collection of short stories not only speaks for the silenced weak in the lower-middle class,more importantly,he also sends an alert warning to the whole society through literature that the chain reaction caused by the lack of individual responsibility will eventually lead to the chaos and disorder of the overall society,thus revealing the importance and urgency of constructing individual responsibility.