Analysis of Raymond Carver's 'They're not your husband'

“They’re not your husband” is a short story written by Raymond Carver, which was first released in 1973, but it also appeared in his collection of short stories in 1976, called “Will You Please Be Quiet, please?”

The story concerns a man called Earl and his wife Doreen. She works as a waitress at a 24-hour coffee shop, and Earl is a salesman but is unemployed. One day at the coffee shop, Earl overhears some men calling Doreen fat, which he gets frustrated over. Earl decides to do something about it, so he makes Doreen stop eating food, to make her lose fat. After some time, Doreen has lost a lot of weight, which is noticed by her colleagues, but not in a good way. The end of the story takes place at the coffee shop, where Earl tries to get another man’s opinion on Doreen, by indirectly asking him to rate her attractiveness. People overhear him talking about Doreen, and she is asked, if she knew who he was, to which she shruggingly answers: “He is my husband.”.

Earl is the main person in this story, the person we follow the most through the third-person narrator. He seems like an insecure man, who drinks a lot. In the very start of the story, it says: “One night when he was drinking…” which makes the fact that he is drinking sound natural, as if it is something he does often. When he overhears the two men at the coffee shop talking bad about Doreen’s body, he doesn’t defend her, he just storms out. Then when he confronts Doreen about her body she says: “You never said anything before”, and he replies: “I haven’t felt like it was a problem before”. This shows that other’s opinion about his wife is important to him, but he is too insecure to say anything about it before it really bothers him. Then later in the coffee shop, when Doreen had lost a lot of weight, he asks a man what he thinks of her. He feels proud at that point and wants to get some sort of positive reaction from the man, which would make him feel even prouder. He also tries to get Doreen’s coworker to compliment her before that. ”Who’s your friend?” he said to the waitress and nodded at his wife. “Her name is Doreen” the waitress said. “She looked a lot different somehow than last time I was in here” he said. “I wouldn’t know” the waitress said. He clearly knows who his wife is, but he is hoping to get an honest reply from the waitress, telling him that she had lost some weight, and looked better. To his disappointment, the waitress doesn’t compliment Doreen.