To say that “All conflict in literature is, in its simplest form, a struggle between good and evil” is to describe a specific type of literature such as fairy tales, but in the short story genre the real conflict is actually a struggle between the writer and ambiguity. This is shown clearly in Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” and Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”
“Pet Dog” is a story in which there are no particularly good or evil characters and, although it centers on adultery, there is no sense of the author judging his characters. Rather, he depicts them as fairly normal people who stumble into a situation that is far more complicated than they realize. The male character, Dmitry Dmitrich Gurov starts an affair out of boredom with Anna Sergeyevna, a young, recently married woman also holidaying at Yalta and not only bored but dissatisfied. Anna’s expectations are not clear but Gurov, a man of the world with a low opinion of women, whom he calls “the inferior race” (Chekhov 289), believes the affair will start and finish at Yalta. To his surprise he finds, a month after returning to Moscow, that he has fallen in love with Anna. Gurov, once a cynical man, now finds that “almost against his will and against his belief, his sexual worldliness turns into the honesty and difficulty of belated love” (Welty 1312).
Both he and Anna are in a terrible moral dilemma. He cannot leave his wife and children and she cannot divorce her “flunkey” husband, nor can they stop seeing each other. These two people, so different, yet complement each other perfectly, loving each other “like man and wife, like tender friends,” and they are bewildered at having to live in separate cages. The image Chekhov uses here vividly shows the anguish of the two newly freed spirits who yet find themselves trapped in marriage at a time before divorce became an option. Anna has religious scruples about her actions, or at least she did in Yalta. Once Gurov has come to her hometown to declare his love, she accepts that this is more important to her than morality or religion, even more important than her happiness.
While at Yalta Gurov and Anna went through an experience while sitting on a bench early in the morning at Oreanda, overlooking the Black Sea. It is here that Gurov (Anna’s thoughts remain unknown) understands a fundamental truth about life: that individuals do not matter to nature but that we may well be “part of unceasing movement towards perfection” (Chekhov 293). This epiphany can be interpreted in many ways and yet its essence is clear to Gurov and to Anna: their love makes everything more beautiful because it manifests “the higher aims of life and our own human dignity.” Once he has been reminded of that, he can no longer settle for his old life which now seems “futile, dull and senseless” (Nabokov 1474). It is a story, as Nabokov observes, that has no definite full-stop but continues “with the natural motion of life” (1476). In such stories the reader should not look for a moral at the end because to add one would end that motion.
Raymond Carver’s story communicates an important truth to the reader yet it remains ambiguous regardless how closely it is analyzed. Four people sit in a kitchen, drinking and talking about love while the light of day fades and gives way to night, a running metaphor which suggests that the more they talk and drink, the less they understand. Love is taken for granted by most people who use the term and yet, the story asks, what are we really talking about? Each character has a different and incompatible view of love from the others, and it is the clash of these four truths that makes this story so tension-filled.
Terri tells them her previous boyfriend loved her so passionately that he dragged her around the living room saying “I love you, I love you, you bitch” (Carver 243). Mel, a cardiologist and therefore a doctor of the heart, says that isn’t love, that real love existed only in the days of knights in shining armor. Nick reminds him that the weight of that armor caused knights to fall off their horse, which may be an allegory of what happened to Mel’s first marriage because as he drinks more, Mel reveals that he wants to kill his first wife. Together Mel and Terri personify ambivalence, or at least the proximity of love and hate, a fact of life that transcends categories of good and evil. Laura, on the other hand, says that she and Nick know what love is, “for us, I mean” and Nick, after she prompts him, makes a “big production” out of kissing her hand and says that they are lucky (Carver 246).
Some readers may believe that it is Terri who makes the strongest case because her boyfriend’s commitment to her was total. Her current husband, however, hates his ex-wife more than he loves Terri, but his hatred does not go beyond drunken revenge fantasies. Other readers may choose Nick and Laura as “embodying a simple yet profound enjoyment of one another’s company” (Saltzman 1540), which could serve as a definition of love. That interpretation overlooks Laura’s anxious prompts and Nick’s noncommittal responses. It may be that their marriage is already failing; at least, as darkness falls Nick tells them he could “head right on out into the sunset,” an image taken from Western movies where the cowboy rides off alone, leaving behind a heartbroken woman.
To quote Chekhov: “To a chemist there is nothing impure on earth. The writer should be just as objective as the chemist; he should liberate himself from everyday subjectivity and acknowledge that manure piles play a highly respectable role in the landscape and that evil passions are every bit as much a part of life as good ones” (Chekhov on Writing).
Works Cited
Carver, Raymond. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Ed. Ann Charters. The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1995. 243-52.
Chekhov, Anton. “Chekhov on Writing.” Nebraska Center for Writers. Creighton University. Web.
Chekhov, Anton. “The Lady with the Pet Dog.” Ed. Ann Charters. The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1995. 289-301.
Nabokov, Vladimir. “A Reading of Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’.” Ed. Ann Charters. The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1995. 1471-77.
Saltzman, Arthur M. “A Reading of ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’.” Ed. Ann Charters. The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1995. 1539-40.
Welty, Eudora. “Reality in Chekhov’s Stories.” Ed. Ann Charters. The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1995. 1512-13.
Outline
Introduction: Literature is not the struggle between good and evil, only with the struggle between the writer and ambiguity.
2nd paragraph: Chekhov does not judge his characters but records the events that take place when two people fall in love when they least expect to.
3rd paragraph: Anna and Gurov are in a moral dilemma but they must keep seeing each other. It is more important to them than morality, religion or even happiness.
4th paragraph: At Yalta they have an epiphany while sitting on a bench overlooking the Black Sea, which reminds them of their “higher aims.” After that they cannot bear their ordinary lives because life without love seems pointless. That is why they must continue to see each other.
5th paragraph: Carver’s truth remains an ambiguous one. Four people talk about love but their ideas are incompatible. The shift from light to darkness suggests a deepening ignorance. In the end the reader must choose between passionate love and calm love, but indifference may win out.
6th paragraph: Readers may choose sides but the writer has to record what he sees.