ABSTRACT
A few years before the publication of the final stories, William Stull, the first major Carver scholar, asserted that “Carver’s abiding theme” is the failure of communication (“RC 1984” 242). Evident in key Will You Please? stories such as “Nobody Said Anything,” “Fat,” and “They’re Not Your Husband,” the theme assumes its greatest significance in What We Talk About, as almost every story exemplifies communication gone awry. Most Cathedral stories illustrate the theme as well. Amidst the rubble, however, a few successful patches of communication, verbal or otherwise, have always existed. Sexual intercourse, haircutting, and collaborative drawing contribute to the affirmative resolutions of, respectively, “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?,” “The Calm,” and “Cathedral.” Narration, as Nelson Hathcock demonstrates in his readings of “Feathers” and “Cathedral,” is sometimes “a means of freedom and enfranchisement” (39), while confessional narrative in “Where I’m Calling From,” “Fever,” and “A Small, Good Thing” shows that communication may be cathartic, restorative, and even liberating. In the final stories, Carver treats the communication theme less affirmatively in a superficial sense, eschewing spectacular successes like the epiphanic liberation in “Cathedral” or the baker’s redemption in “A Small, Good Thing”; indeed, nothing is as overtly positive as Carlyle’s renewal by cathartic narrative. Nevertheless, several of the final stories published in Where I’m Calling From subtly associate limited gains with the narrative act, while returning again to the motif of successful nonverbal communication. Raymond Carver was never an optimist, and the collective vision in the final stories is slightly less optimistic than Cathedral’s. Yet, if the magnitude of success is greatly diminished, there may well be, however small, more victories.
