ABSTRACT
While providing additional coverage of the volume that skyrocketed Carver to literary stardom, I return again to what Marshall Bruce Gentry calls “the complicated issue” of whether “Carver manages to avoid dominating his characters” (134). According to Nesset, “If Carver’s characters ultimately seem dominated, it is not due to authorial manipulativeness” but to Carver’s “willingness to reproduce a world where domination and alienation are reigning phenomena” (Stories 49). The problem is less the world, however, than the characters’ lack of tools, whether they be intellectual, emotional, or economic, to solve or even ameliorate difficulties. To focus on such people is hardly manipulative, yet, as the analysis of “The Bath” demonstrates, the fiction occasionally manifests excessive authorial control. Furthermore, probed deeply, Carver stories-especially those from Will You Please? and What We Talk About-will evince actions that are not clearly explainable. Although the paucity of explanation respecting character motivation does not disturb me, readers less impressed with Carver’s craftsmanship may be more inclined to see undue authorial manipulation.
