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What Does Raymond Carver Reveal About One's Identity

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What does Raymond Carver reveal about one’s identity? Raymond Carver reveals the identify in people with the similarities of his characters and everyday humans, like you and me. Characters in his stories are the are peopled with the type of lower-middle-class status. Carver’s fictional world is a place where people are average everyday people; some strange, never perfect, just normal. Living the lives as waitresses, mechanics, postmen, high school teachers, factory workers, and door-to-door salesmen. Not living in a magical wonderland story, but in the dull, uninteresting tale of the drab life of the usual hardworking person. When one thinks of the meaning of identity, you would think of maybe the qualities of someone or their beliefs, that make them different from others. Standing out differently from the crowd because of their identity, or who someone is. In Carver’s examples; characters like Mel, the Fat Man, and The Baker, all have different but similar identities. All …show more content…

The character’s in the stories use alcohol to dampen their fear of death. But all of their use of alcohol in the stories, in some certain cases brings them closer to death. People in our society deal with this same issue. Connecting our society’s identity to the ones Carver depicts in the stories. Alcohol allows the Characters in the stories and, people in our society to loosen up. Getting drunk to tell their stories, but the inebriation robs them of their reason to comprehend how to tell it. If they are able to finish their stories, it is possible that they won’t remember what happened in their drunken experiences in a few short hours. This happens all the time in our modern-day culture, getting wasted to forget what’s really important for those few short hours. Its this connection out of others, that connects our societies identity to the Carvers

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