Carver’s Characters
Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, on May 25, 1938, and lived in Port Angeles, Washington during his last ten, sober years until his death from cancer on August 2, 1988. He was twice awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1983 Carver received the prestigious Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award, and in 1985 Poetry magazine's Levinson Prize. In 1988 he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Hartford. He received a Brandeis Citation for fiction in 1988. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.
In many ways, Carver's life was the model ...
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Somewhere in the middle of this life he realized, very much like one of his characters, that things would not change.
What Carver deals with in almost all of his stories is the daily responsibilities of life weighing down on one's shoulders. "Almost all the characters in my stories come to the point where they realize that compromise, giving in, plays a major role in their lives," Carver said. "Then one single moment of revelation disrupts the pattern of their daily lives. It's a fleeting moment during which they don't want to compromise anymore. And afterwards they realize that nothing ever really changes" (Gentry 80).
More than once Carver has been criticized for dealing ironically with his characters. He always denied it. "I'm not talking down to my characters, or holding them up for ridicule, or slyly doing an end run around them. I'm much more interested in my characters, in the people in my story, than I am in any potential reader. I'm uncomfortable with irony if it's at ...
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quit drinking. And he knew it, too....What happened next was he was affected by CNS seizures. For a certain number of alcoholics, especially the heaviest drinkers, their nervous system has become so adjusted to having alcohol that when they stop drinking they go into seizures, as though with epilepsy. These seizures are very dangerous. It's how brains are damaged during convulsions” (Halpert 59). Between October of 1976 and January of 1977, he was hospitalized four times for acute alcoholism. His house was sold in October and he began living apart from his wife, all at the same time. When he was asked how alcohol worked for or against his work, he recognized his relationship to alcohol as ...
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"Carver’s Characters." Essayworld.com. July 22, 2007. Accessed November 22, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Carvers-Characters/68409.
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