Ray Carver Essay

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Raymond Carver's "Gazebo" to "what we talk about when we talk about love"

The entire theme is very much an existentialist one with both stories alluding to the meaninglessness of love, lust, alcoholism, boredom, and, running through it all, the futility of everything. Life equals death -- is perhaps even more than death, for whilst death denotes passivity and absence of negativity, life is full of these destructive elements of infidelity, despair, meaninglessness, and torpor.

In Raymond Carver's "Gazebo," Duane and Holly, managers of a motel, are two aimless characters that, at one time, had higher dreams for their life. Duane, at least, is a college graduate, and from both Duane and Holly's action and speech, we get a clear impression that both feel cheated by their existence. They don't seem to do much. They receive free lodging and utilities and a small stipend. And both are hankering for more.

Duane cannot forget his previous affair with a Hispanic maid (aimless thoguh it was), and Holly cannot reawaken Duane's former passion for her, nor can she forget that he cheated on her. In an attempt to reignite his passion, she goes so far as to pour whisky on his stomach and lick it off. She fails to stimulate his passion and accuses him of killing her.

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Here, as so often in the story, whiskey, infidelity, and death are integrated.

Whiskey is a prominent piece in the story. When the pair want to settle things, they do it by holing themselves up in a room with a bottle of whisky. Whiskey, in fact, is prominent in "What we talk about when we talk about love" too.

There, the characters, bored and drift less, soak themselves in the liquid. "What we talk about when we talk about love" -- taking those words literally and extracting them form the title - seem, in Carver's world, to indicate whiskey and emptiness. Love, he seems to infer, is transient, and, just like life itself, contrary to how romantics paint it.….....

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