Raymond Carver was a famous short story writer who is most known for his ability to capture concepts of American life. His writings are typically centered upon common daily occurrences within the lives of average people. One of the main themes that run through Raymond Carver’s short stories in his collection “Will You Please be Quiet, Please?” is the theme of lower-class life as can be seen in his stories “Fat”, “Neighbors”, “The Student’s Wife” and “The Ducks.”
In “Fat,” the narrator is a woman who is telling her friend Rita about a customer she had in her restaurant.
As she tells her story, it becomes clear that she is in the lower class of workers because she is a waitress in a small diner and lives with the cook, Rudy. The way she talks about this customer is also in a lower-class style as she tells Rita, “This fat man is the fattest person I have ever seen, though he is neat-appearing and well dressed enough. Everything about him is big. But it is the fingers I remember best … They look three times the size of a normal person’s fingers – long, thick, creamy fingers’ (3).
Although she seems to feel sorry for the fat man and his strange way of talking and his puffing sound, it isn’t until near the end of the story that she begins to identify with the fat man. As everyone in the diner is making fun of him because he is fat, she understands that this isn’t necessarily his fault, that there are other things at work behind his overweight status and she feels sad that she is also lost in a world where people don’t understand her, not even her best friend. “That’s a funny story, Rita says, but I can see she doesn’t know what to make of it.
I feel depressed” (6).
In “Neighbors,” Bill and Arlene Miller are also just average people who feel as if they are missing something important in their life as they watch their neighbors always going out and doing things. “It seemed to the Millers that the Stones lived a fuller and brighter life” (7).
That these people live in the lower class is made clear when Carver mentions that they are neighbors because they live across the hall from each other. The entire story takes place at a time when the Stones have left for a vacation and the Millers are asked to take care of the cat and to water the plants.
As Bill goes over to feed the cat, he begins to gain a new sense of himself as if he were actually Jim Stone as he makes himself a drink and begins to explore the apartment. Each time he goes over to feed the cat, he makes himself a little more at home, eventually getting to a point where he is putting on Jim’s clothing to imagine himself in Jim’s position. Things get a little weird when he puts on Harriet’s bra, panties, skirt, and blouse. The only reason he doesn’t put on her shoes is that he realizes they won’t fit.
Each time he goes over to Stone’s apartment, he comes back to his own apartment with a new sense of life, of having escaped his own little world for a while. Arlene seems to find the same kind of release when she goes over to feed the cat as she is gone an abnormally long time, too. When Bill goes looking for her, “he noticed white lint clinging to the back of her sweater, and the color was high in her cheeks” (13). While he had explored the kitchen, the liquor cabinet, and the clothing, she admits that she had found pictures. However, in their excitement, they manage to lock themselves out of the apartment and must prepare for the arrival of their long-time friends and the necessity of having to admit their voyeurism.
“The Student’s Wife” demonstrates a more desperate sense of entrapment in the lower class lifestyle that the family has apparently lived in for a while. Almost all of this story takes place during a single night as a husband and wife lay in bed long after the children have been put in bed.
Although both husband and wife seem to enjoy poetry, him reading to her as they lay in bed, her dreams have become much more mundane than the happy pursuit of language. She has dreams of being squeezed into very tight and insecure spaces that cause her arms and legs to hurt when she wakes up, suggesting that she is feeling constrained within this lifestyle. “It was so narrow it hurt my legs, and I was afraid the water was going to come in over the sides” (122).
Although she remembers happy days when they ate spam over a campfire and slept outside, she has a sense that life should be better by this stage and feels trapped in their present circumstances perhaps forever. As she tells her husband about what she wants, she reveals her loneliness in wishing they had more friends, she illustrates their poverty as she talks about wanting to own a home and not move around so much and she exposes her desperation in trying to tell him that she likes to be touched sometimes. However, he falls asleep and leaves her to sit awake all night to watch the ugliness of the morning light exposing all the nastiness of her surroundings. “Not in pictures she had seen nor in any book she had read had she learned a sunrise was so terrible as this” (129).
Carver’s story “The Ducks” begins with this same sense of desolation and entrapment but ends on a slightly more optimistic note. The story is about a young couple who apparently live in a poor house in a remote location. Their poverty is expressed in the clothesline with sheets that haven’t dried in three days and the necessity for him to be outside splitting wood to keep the house warm.
Carver makes it clear that the story is set close to modern times because the couple is planning on taking their paycheck to Reno on the weekend. However, the two people are very lonely in their existence together. They barely exchange any words as they eat and she tells the glass of her closed kitchen window, “I just hate to have you gone all the time. It seems like you’ve gone all the time” (176).
Although he plans on going duck hunting in the morning, after his night shift at the mill where he works, he comes home early from work after one of the foremen dies of a heart attack. Throughout the evening he spends at home with his wife, the man begins to empathize with the man who died, understanding how much of his own life is slipping by as he goes through the motions of life where they are. He begins to notice the shabbiness of their home and the loneliness his wife must experience as she spends so much time alone in that house while he works or hunts. Although he enjoyed going to Reno to gamble, that night “he tried to concentrate on the wheel.
He looked and looked and listened and listened and heard the saws and the machinery slowing down, coming to a stop” (181). Although he’s alone in the night, there is hope in the story that the couple has decided to move on and that he continues to turn to her for companionship.
While Carver continues to tell the story of lower-class life in a way that doesn’t try to hide any of the ugliness or desperation, he does so in a way that both affirms and rejects the common view. Most people think of lower-class life as always desperate, alone, and without hope.
Carver’s stories reflect these ideas as his characters live in poor circumstances, battle with feelings of desperation and loneliness, and seem to be trapped forever in the cycle of failure they find themselves in. This is particularly seen in the stories “Fat” and “The Student’s Wife” in which both women seem to feel completely alone and misunderstood in an ugly world where they are powerless to bring about any change. However, Carver is also capable of illustrating how these people find hope and connections with each other regardless of the circumstances.
This is seen as Bill and Arlene cling to each other at the end of “Neighbors” as well as when the man and woman determine together to move on to the next possibility toward the end of “The Ducks.”
Through these portrayals, Carver indicates he has a strong understanding and empathy for the lower classes.
Works Cited
Carver, Raymond. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? New York: McGraw Hill, 1976.