Raymond Carver's short story "Why Don't You Dance?" centers on a very particular small setting: a driveway. The main character is an alcoholic who is going through a rough time in his life. He is holding a garage sale, but the reason is not simply to get rid of old things and make a little bit of money. The drunken protagonist is selling all of his possessions. This is not told explicitly in the story, but it is hinted at several times and makes this conclusion obvious. Therefore, the yard sale is a symbolic act of letting go of one's past. The main character's wife seems to have left him, which explains the act of selling items that could have possibly been objects that remind him of his former wife.

The fact that he decides to sell his possessions in a public manner—a yard sale for all to see—shows that the protagonist is crying out, expressing his sadness in a visible yet subtle way. When he sells all of the items in the house, the protagonist essentially destroys the home he had built with his former wife piece by piece. Each item has a significance and a story behind it. It is possible that the record player and the particular record being played are items that sharply remind him of his former wife. When he asks the young couple to dance in front of him, he seems to be trying to watch a reenactment of when he and his ex-wife used to dance to that record.

When the drunken man cuts in between the couple and dances with the young woman, it is evident that he is lonely and misses his wife. The man is trying to recapture his youth; more specifically, though, he is trying to remember what he felt when he first fell in love with his former wife. However, the young woman he is dancing with breaks this illusion by commenting that the old man is "desperate." This brings him back to reality.