Dec 30, 2009

Cathedral | Social Concerns

Raymond Carver's fiction has been praised for its stunning depiction of the cultural and moral climate of contemporary America. His stories mirror lower-middle-class American lives, particularly their loneliness and desperation. Marriage is a central subject, with divorce and separation its frequent consequences. Carver has said that his fiction is not designed to change things, nor to improve the lot of suffering humanity. Instead he offers it "to allow certain areas of life to be understood a little better than they were understood before." His method for achieving this is to make his...