Point of view in Raymond Carver's short story 'So Much Water So Close To Home'

Friedrich-Schiller-University, Jena

Point of view in Raymond Carver′s short story
"So Much Water So Close To Home"

by

Thomas Daßler

Table of contents

1. Introduction 3

2. Point of view 3

2.1 General 3
2.2 Point of view in the story 3

2.2.1 Point of view of Claire 4
2.2.2 Point of view of Stuart 6

3. Minimalism 7

3.1 Minimalism in the story 7
3.2 "So much water so close to home" 8

4. Summary 8

5. Bibliography 10

1. Introduction

My seminar paper is divided into three main parts. At first I will concentrate on the point of view, with the typical three kinds. After that I show the point of view in this short story, later on I discuss Claire′s point of view with the central thesis of Claire as an insane, paranoid and inconsistent character. Afterwards I will describe Stuart′s point of view and the reasons why one the one hand Claire sees him as a typical man, on the other hand why he seems quite dull to the reader. The second part refers to the topic of minimalism, the connection between minimalism and point of view in "So Much Water So Close To Home" and I try to answer the question, if the short story is written in typical minimalist style. The last part deals with the conclusion and a summary of my argumentation.

2. Point of view

2.1. General

When we talk about point of view we have to distinguish between three different kinds. The first one is the authorial narration, where the narrator is not a character involved in the story, omniscient and omnipresent. The second kind is called figural narration; the narrator is a character in the story, has a limited point of view and remains covert. The last one is the first person narration. The first person narrator can be "I as protagonist", where it is main character, on the one hand, on the other "I as witness", where the teller of the story is only a minor character. Both types have a limited point of view. There is often a narrating distance created by the distinction between narrating and experiencing I.

2.2. Point of view in the story

The text is written in a first person point of view. It is the dominantly viewpoint. The first person narrator is Claire, the wife of Stuart. She participates in the action of the story. That is shown clearly in: “He looks at me and looks away.”¹ or “’Was I staring?’ I say, and shake my head.” (79)

The story “is largely concerned with the stain that this event puts on their marriage”². She is an “I as protagonist” narrator, because she is telling the whole story through her point of view and is the main character. Because of a first person narrator’s restricted knowledge, which can be proofed with several examples: “Maybe they played” (81), “I suppose” (82) or “Afterwards, I think he stayed awake.” (82) Claire is unreliable. She only tells what was told her; she did not witness the main event of the story. This is shown to the reader in her report. When she tells what happened you find the phrase: “One of the men – my Stuart didn’t say which – said […].” (81) Another fact is that Claire therefore also is unreliable, because her point of view is the only one the reader gets to know directly. An interesting point is that there is no narrative distance; Claire tells the story in the present tense, which only changes once with the flashback telling the events of her husband and the other men during their trip. The present tense is the first reason, why the reader is a bit confused reading the story. Claire can furthermore be described as an overt narrator, because we know she is telling the story. To emphasize Claire’s unreliability, the author uses short and simple sentences. At the beginning of the story for example he uses several times the same sentence structure for Claire’s mind. This is underlined by the use of “He […]” (79) five times.

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1 Raymond Carver, What we talk about when we talk about love (New York: Vintage, 1989) 79 (all page references within the text refer to this edition”)

2 Adam Meyer, “Now you see him, now you don‘t, now you do again: The evolution of Raymond Carver‘s minimalism“, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 26 (1989): 242