Raymond Carver: analyse af noveller og digt

The writer and minimalist Raymond Carver wrote a stream of different literature during his carrier, often with some of the themes repeated in the different works. In the two short stories “Tell the Women We’re Going” and “They’re not Your Husband” plus the poem “Locking Yourself Out, Then Trying to Get Back In”, he writes about people in life situations they are not satisfied with, which makes them rethink their lives or try to break free from the ordinary day.

The theme will primarily be represented with an analysis and interpretation of “Tell the Women We’re Going”, a story about two young men’s division between the young, wild life as a bachelor and the ordinary home life, which is expected of everyone to live.

Jerry and Bill are friends from way back and share everything together, even girls. They are first-class bachelors and male chauvinists, but the wild and carefree life suddenly ends, when Jerry gets married to his girlfriend Carol and starts a family. His new life style reduces his friendship with Bill, as they have now different interests, but within a couple of years, Bill settles down too, and gets married to his girlfriend Linda. Jerry’s life seems to be the perfect middle-class life: He’s married, has two children and one more on its way and barbecues with Bill and Linda every Saturday and Sunday at his big, fashionable home. However, Jerry is truly struck by the futility and emptiness of his ordinary, successful life and becomes sulky and peevish, which one day makes Bill take him on a ride, only the two of them, with the implicit purpose of regaining their lost adolescence. They play pool, drink and drive around to pick up girls for quick sex, but their score abilities are not what they use to be, which in the end leads Jerry to kill two girls, they have tried to get late with, as an act of revenge on women in general for having separated the boys and stolen their boyhood happiness. The title “Tell the Women We’re Going” refers to that point. Jerry and Bill are actual dismissing their wifes (and lives) for the benefit of their bachelor life style and by the careless and discriminatory wording “women” it is indicates. “Women” also tell us that it could be any women, because especially Jerry don’t trust women and won’t stick to them anymore.