Analyse af Raymond Carvers 'Popular Mechanics'

Raymond Carver, born in 1938 and deceased 1988, is a short story writer and poet, who is well known for his very minimalistic style. His stories are often stripped down to their core, leaving only facts and small clues of what the true matter in the specific story really is, and therefore keeping the story simple and realistic. The need for long and detailed descriptions doesn't exist in his way of writing, nor does he ever want to give too much away; he likes to force or maybe challenge his readers into using their imagination and perception. In other words, he uses what is called the “iceberg technique”. The top of the iceberg is sticking up above the water, while the rest is being hidden down below where you can't see it, the top consisting only of about 10 percent of the whole iceberg. Also, he prefers to focus and write about the sadness and loss in the everyday lives of ordinary people, usually lower- and middle-class people, this in fact making it “easier” for a wider range of people to read, interpret and identify their own lives in his short stories and poems.

His short story “Popular Mechanics” is very characteristic for his writing. The story is universal and timeless, and this lack of detail allows readers to develop a setting that fits with their own lifestyle. It is written from a third person narratives perspective, who is fully objective, which distances us very much from the whole situation in the text. The introduction, or the exposition, in which we would normally get to know our characters, is excluded. Instead the story begins in medias res, which makes the reader feel like they're thrown into the middle of the story. Although, the first paragraph, or the “intro” to the story, is rather figurative and he uses several metaphors. It is short, but very descriptive of the current circumstances, unlike the rest of the story; We meet a man who is busy packing his suitcase, about to leave his wife or girlfriend. The girlfriend comes in to interrupt him, telling him several times how happy she is that he is leaving, probably trying to convince herself, mostly. She's obviously very upset about everything turning out like this, starting to cry and complain about how he doesn't pay any attention to her, then noticing a picture of their baby on the table. She takes the picture and walks out of the room, and this triggers something in the quietness. By taking the picture, she tries to provoke him and push him over the edge, because he doesn't want to look at her face. They start to argue over the picture, then making it turn into a fight over the actual baby, which the mother is now holding instead of the picture. It ends with the baby being supposedly injured. In this situation Carver does not use straightforward adjectives to describe the characters, but through their actions and dialogue, the reader can easily identify and associate them with someone they may know. It is as if this kind of fight has occurred many times before, so he knows that there is no sense in replaying this scene again in details. At first it wasn't the fathers plan to take the baby with him. You can tell by the way he packs his suitcase and is about to leave soon enough, and how he then suddenly announces that he wants the baby.