Neighbors "Neighbors is a short story written by Raymond Carver in 1988. It is from the collection of short stories "Short cuts". The short story is in brief about the married couple Bill and Arlene Miller, who lives opposite the married couple Harriet and Jim stone. Bill and Arlene constantly see themselves in the light of the Stones' happy life. Bill is a bookkeeper and Arlene is a secretary, while Jim is a salesman for a machine-parts firm. In the story the Stones are going on a business trip combined with a family trip. Bill and Arlene are set to look after the Stones' apartment, feeding the cat, Kitty, and water their plants. In the Stones' absence Bill and Arlene show themselves from a side you normally don't experience from people that is to say the side that shows when you are alone with yourself with the minds curiosity. The story takes place over the course of 3 days. We have an objective third party storyteller and the entire story is written in the past with a few dialogs here and there. It is chronological and we don't experience any flashbacks or flashforwards. The language isn't advanced, the sentences aren't exactly long and there aren't any complicated words. That is probably due to the fact that the story takes place in an everyday life, in an everyday life environment and also in a very normal situation (it must be said to be normal to feed the cat and water the plants, when the neighbors are away). To sum up it is not a demanding text in terms of the length or the difficulty. We don't know where the story takes place or when it takes place. We don't even know how old our main characters are. Is it even necessary? Raymond Carver gets in stories a hold on themes like alcoholism, poverty, divorce and misfor... ... middle of paper ... ...nd then the real world. I like his stories very much. That is probably due to the fact that I tend to like the stories of Raymond Carver which I find very fascinating and stimulating. I don't know how much I necessary like the ending of the story. I would have liked him to give Bill and Arlene a better ending but at the same time it is this absurd situation and the touch of irony that gives the finishing touch. The story also gets the grotesqueness that Carver is famous for and he really end the story where the climax is it is here the couple is hanging over the cliff in a situation where everything looks bad for them. It is up to the fantasy how it turns out for the couple Carver's short stories can have so many aspects due to the minimalism he has uses during his stories that the only limit is our own fantasy and the few guide lines we are given in the stories.
"Unit 2: Reading & Writing About Short Fiction." ENGL200: Composition and Literature. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011. 49-219. Web. 19 Apr. 2014.
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In Raymond Carver’s “Neighbors” the speaker’s attention seems to be more directed on the Bill and Arlene Miller. The Millers are a married couple who were once a happy couple but as the years went along they felt grew apart. It seems as though they are too busy comparing their lives to the Harriet and Jim Stone, which are their neighbors, that they don’t have time to fix their marriage. The Stones do what married people should do and that’s “go out for dinner, or entertaining at home, or traveling about the country somewhere…(70).” The Millers are given the responsibility of looking after the
“Short Stories." Short Story Criticism. Ed. Jelena Krstovic. Vol. 127. Detroit: Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010. 125-388. Literature Criticism Online. Gale. VALE - Mercer County Community College. 28 February 2014
Raymond Carver uses strategic dialogue and point-of-view to illuminate the themes of his stories. After reading “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” and “ Cathedral” the reader is able to mend each piece of work together and understand how Carver creates his short stories.
In Raymond Carver's 'The Bath' and rewritten version of the story entitled 'A Small, Good Thing', the author tells the same tale in different ways, and to different ends, creating variegated experiences for the reader. Both stories have the same central plot and a majority of details remain the same, but the effects that the stories have upon the reader is significantly different. The greatest character difference is found in the role of the Baker, and his interaction with the other characters. The sparse details, language and sentence structure of 'The Bath' provide a sharp contrast emotionally and artistically to 'A Small Good Thing'. In many ways, 'The Bath' proves to have a more emotional impact because of all that it doesn't say; it's sparse, minimalist storytelling gives the impression of numbed shock and muted reactions. The descriptive storytelling of 'A Small Good Thing' goes deeper into the development of the characters and although it tells more story, it ends on a note of hopefulness, instead of fear or desperation. Each story has it's own magic that weave it's a powerful. When compared to each other the true masterpiece of each story is best revealed.
... In Teaching Short Fiction 9.2 (2009): 102-108. Literary Reference Center Plus. Web. 2 Apr. 2014.
Carver tells the story mainly through what happens in the story, rather than through the narrator’s perspective or the characters’ emotion and personalities. He connects all the events in the story in a logical way by using the elements rising action and climax. Therefore, he drew the reader 's’ attention and raise their curiosity toward what would happen next in the story. At the end, Carver finishes the story with an open ending which is a great way to end the story when the characters are not fully described in both emotion and personality. Therefore, the readers couldn’t predict what the characters would do to solve the conflict. By ending the story with an open ending, Carver allows the readers to create their own ending and satisfy with their own
Short stories are temporary portals to another world; there is a plethora of knowledge to learn from the scenario, and lies on top of that knowledge are simple morals. Langston Hughes writes in “Thank You Ma’m” the timeline of a single night in a slum neighborhood of an anonymous city. This “timeline” tells of the unfolding generosities that begin when a teenage boy fails an attempted robbery of Mrs. Jones. An annoyed bachelor on a British train listens to three children their aunt converse rather obnoxiously in Saki’s tale, “The Storyteller”. After a failed story attempt, the bachelor tries his hand at storytelling and gives a wonderfully satisfying, inappropriate story. These stories are laden with humor, but have, like all other stories, an underlying theme. Both themes of these stories are “implied,” and provide an excellent stage to compare and contrast a story on.
The minimalist story I am going to analyze is “Cat in the Rain” by Ernest Hemingway. One of the main characteristic found in minimalist pieces is an evident lack of detail. This is done through short and simple sentences. The Cat in the Rain is a story of an American couple on vacation in Italy; Hemingway’s’ story could be misconstrued as a dull literary piece, in fact it is not even close, it is like a complicated jigsaw puzzle in reverse order so that you have to take the story apart, to completely understand the underlying meaning of the text. Hemingway uses a lot of symbolism and repetition which is two of the characteristics of minimalism to emphasize specific emotions within the text and has embedded the theme of the story deep within it. I felt that the specific theme of this short story was the couples’ troubled relationship. As the reader I questioned many things, how was the mood set? What emotions were being shown through the sub-content? What did the cat represent? Who was the dominant one in the relationship and was this shown within the story?
'Good fences make good neighbors.' " The neighbor is doing nothing more than what his father
The two neighborhoods that I chose to use for this assignment are vastly different. The main reason is because they are on opposite sides of the country. The first neighborhood that I visited is the one that I grew up in. This neighborhood is in Connecticut, on the East Coast, all the way across the country from the neighborhood that I currently live in here in West Hollywood. Most of my family lives in Connecticut and Massachusetts and I’m the only one who lives on the West Coast. A big difference is that the neighborhood in Connecticut has houses that are more spaced out, have larger lawns, and very many more trees. There are very few apartments there, unlike where I live now where my entire street is almost all apartment buildings.
Growing up in a massive neighborhood magnificent. My neighborhood flooded with kids around my age to hang out with. Occupying the edge of this neighborhood was a large park where the neighborhood’s kids and I would spend most of our time eliminating their boredom. When this park would not satisfy our needs, there were