Literary Theories
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Friday, January 18, 2013
LITERARY GENRE: SHORT STORY
SO MUCH WATER, SO CLOSE TO HOME
RAYMOND CARVER
Deconstruction criticism posits an undecidability of meaning for all texts. The text has intertwined and contradictory discourses, gaps, and incoherencies, since language itself is unstable and arbitrary. The critic doesn't undermine the text; the text already dismantles itself. Its rhetoric subverts or undermines its ostensible meaning.
Deconstructive critics focus on the text like the formalists, but direct attention to the opposite of the New Critical "unities." Instead, they view the "decentering" of texts and point out incompatabilities, rhetorical grain-against-grain contradictions, undecidability within texts. There is often a playfulness to deconstruction, but it can be daunting to read too.
The Plot Summary:
The story features Stuart, his wife Claire and their son Dean. They live together, as a married couple, we don’t know where they live, but it seems like a small town of some sort.
One day Stuart and his friends leaves on a fishing trip, in the mountains, for a couple of days, to play some poker, drink some whiskey and obviously fish. One night one of the guys finds a body, floating around in the water. The men ties the body to a tree, and gets back to drinking. They drink and have fun for the rest of the trip, but decides to leave a day earlier than planned. They call the sheriff about the body, and head home.
He tells his wife about the incident the next morning, this leads to a lot of problems. Not only is she mad that he waited to tell her a story like that, but they slowly seem to drift away from each other.
In an attempt to deal with the situation they drive out to a pond to talk about things, but a similar story from Claire’s childhood, seems to overwhelm her, and she slaps Stuart. After a while they drive home.
Everything just gets worse, after some time Claire sleeps on the couch, and she won’t let Stuart touch her anymore.
Claire learns about the funeral, and heads up for it. There she finds out that the killer has been caught, but everything isn’t back to normal. She seems to despise Stuart more and more, and their relationship reaches some sort of a breaking point as the story ends.
THE INTERPRETATION:
The story raises a question of how someone, a character, can possibly be known completely. It asks how an individual's mind can possibly be understood or predicted. Given the situation in this story, Woman is doing the questioning, the searching, the demanding of answers. The Man is functioning on emotion and even attempting to avoid that by keeping his words to himself.
The actual text itself can be seen as a destruction of traditional fiction narratives; to make a tale's purpose something that the reader must uncover rather than receive extraneously.
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