ABSTRACT
Indeterminacy in Carver’s fiction has been a main topic for critics. Author of the first scholarly book on Carver, Arthur Saltzman asserts, “Carver’s technique shows how even the most modest foray into the world at large overwhelms the ability to absorb anything at all” (11). As a number of his readings imply, Saltzman believes that the inability to know is, to a considerable extent, shared by characters and readers. More explicit in advancing this argument, Jiirgen Pieters contends that our “expectations” to deduce a story’s meaning “will, to some degree, remain frustrated, and that, by extension, [our] fate is not different from that of the characters portrayed in the fiction” (92). “The indecisiveness in which Carver’s characters are caught turns out to be … no more than a reflection of the indecisiveness in which the reader is caught …” (76).
