Carver's Story "Careful"

The method Carver uses in "Careful" to portray the ubiquity and desolation of contingency that dominates modern experience is to present a slice of a slice of life. That being so, one is tempted to designate the story as naturalistic, but Carver's language resists that classification because it is more elliptical than it is explanatory. What is not said about the environment, the emotional and psychological content of the characters' experience, and so on is left to the reader's imagination. What the narrative does explicitly reveal ineluctably becomes a set of clues to the content of the textual lacunae.

The bleakness of Lloyd's life is conveyed not by a full explication of why he lives alone in a rented attic. Carver does not spend a lot of time setting up the background for introducing Lloyd and Inez to the reader. Instead, he implies the background and setup by way of the details of Lloyd's routine, which has come down to nothing so much as the project of how he will store and consume his three bottles of cheap champagne as an organizing principle of daily experience. From the observed particulars of Lloyd's outer life and behavior patterns, as well as the glimpses inside his perceptions owing to the narrative point of view, the reader is left to deduce a full range of incident and emotion that must have passed between Inez and Lloyd before he took up residence in a rented room, and to project forward the general content of Lloyd's future.

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ck to the fundamentals of existence, and even though (or exactly because) there is almost no functional hope in his life, everything that does happen--every movement, gesture, and moment--becomes an aspect of nearly absolute self-absorption and ultimate concern. Thus when Inez knocks on the door he declares himself "in one hell of a shape" (Carver 267), which is true not only because his ear is clogged but also because his life has been truncated. Body and mind have fused in Lloyd; drinking and the coping strategies of a drunkard dominate his consciousness and behavior. That fusion explains his almost complete preoccupation with a clogged ear at a time when Inez is insisting they have to talk about the practical things around which she means to structure their future separate lives. The messiness of unclogging the earwax is to be compared to the messy condition of Lloyd's perceptions more generally and the contrast with his memory of being so much in control of his body as a youth that he could literally blow obstructions out his ear. Nor, by the way, does physically unclogging the ear improve Lloyd's hearing of Inez's concerns--a detail that does appear in the text and that amplifies the symbolism of the clogged ear: She went t

Category: Literature - C