WHOEVER WAS USING THIS BED by RAYMOND CARVER

WHO IS RAYMOND CARVER?

Raymond Carver was a writer of short stories and poet who is known to be one of the most important
contributors to the American literature.
Raymond Clevie Carver Jr. (1938-1988) was born in a mill town in Oregon. The son of a sawmill worker, Carver
experienced firsthand what life was like for the lower middle class. He married a year after finishing high school and had
two children by the age of 20. In order to make ends meet, Carver worked as janitor, sawmill laborer, library assistant,
and delivery man.

In 1958, he became extremely interested in writing after taking a creative writing class at Chico State College. In
1961, Carver published his first short story "The Furious Seasons". He continued to pursue his literary studies at
Humboldt State College in Arcata, California, where he got his B.A. in 1963. During his time at Humboldt, Carver was the
editor for Toyon, his college's literary magazine, and his short stories began to be published in various magazines.

His father was an alcoholic, and Carver began drinking heavily in 1967 shortly following his father's death.
Throughout the 1970s, Carver was repeatedly hospitalized for alcoholism. In 1971, his publication of "Neighbors" in the
June issue of Esquire magazine earned him a teaching position at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He took
another teaching position at the University of California, Berkeley in 1972. The stress of the two positions coupled with
his alcohol-related illnesses caused him to resign his position at Santa Cruz. He went to a treatment center the next year
but didn't stop drinking until 1977 with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous.

His drinking caused problems in his marriage. In 2006, his first wife released a memoir that detailed her
relationship with Carver. In the book, she details how his drinking led to him cheating, which led to more drinking. While
she was attempting to earn her Ph.D., she was constantly set back by her husband's illness:

Burdened by alcoholism for most of his life, when American short story writer and poet Raymond Carver was
asked why he quit drinking, he said “I guess I just wanted to live."¹ Like many famous writers, alcohol was a constant
force in both Carver's life and in his literature. His poems and short stories are dominated by middle-class, mundane
characters who struggle with darkness in their every day lives. Drinking, failed relationships, and death are some of the
prominent themes that plagued not only his characters, but Carver himself as well. After almost losing his career,
watching his marriage dissolve, and being hospitalized countless times, Carver finally stopped drinking at the age of 39.

Raymond Carver | Poetry Foundation

What genre or movement was it?

The second half of the 20th century was a time of innovation in the short story genre, and techniques such as
brevity or imagery were elevated to the maximum.
These writing tools helped short stories become a more complex and relevant literary genre. Carver took said
techniques to the extreme in his 'dirty realism' short stories and in their topics.

A post-Cold War phenomenon, dirty realism arose in an atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia. It often reflects
on capitalism and consumerism through the experiences of blue-collar workers, sometimes using black humor
to lighten the mood. The characters usually have no hope of escaping the poverty of their circumstance. The
dirty realist story "chooses entrapment as its natural habitat." In a subversion of the American dream
narrative, the characters find themselves caught in cycles of existential loneliness and meaninglessness.

What is Dirty Realism (bookbrowse.com)

Raymond Carver is among some of the most significant American short story authors of the 20th century.
Carver's text could be cataloged as realism, but his style goes beyond that. American realism has been based
solely on the American lifestyle of the 19th and 20th centuries. As such, Carver's work represents real
situations; he is not trying to decorate what he is showing to the reader. He describes things as they are.
Consequently, Carver decided to explore minimalism in writing. He showed, in his text, real situations of
everyday life; some of them could be crude, or complicated to understand, but still, he represented feelings
that everyone could recognize: sadness, loneliness, failure, etc. Still, there are some elements in Carver's texts
that differ compared to other American realism authors, because Carver did not search only for the truth in
life, but the crudest truth; thus, Carver's style, as aforementioned, was more specifically described as 'dirty
realism'. In his stories, Carver was not only using the common elements of everyday life, but also some of the
disturbing aspects of it.

A good example of this is in the text Popular Mechanics in which a couple is arguing about their relationship.
The conflict rises to a point where they discuss who is going to keep full custody of their baby after their
separation. Both of them refuse to give in, so they each take their infant by one arm and pull. The author
makes it seem like the baby ends up dead from its parents' abuse, which is why this story is considered one of
the author's crudest, but this brutality has a deeper meaning to it. In the case of this tale, Carver is trying to
demonstrate how pride can lead someone to do the extreme. In fact, it could be even argued that the reasons
for their actions were led by pride rather than love.

Like his predecessors Edgar Allan Poe and Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver continued to search for a way to
tell a story without needing to provide much information. As a result, Carver’s work has been categorized as
‘minimalistic’ writing. His texts show special attention not only to how things can be told with fewer words but
also to the importance of the meaning of each word, playing, in this way, with concepts such as intertextuality
or the double sense.

Short stories base their ideas on how ‘less is more,’ but minimalism was described by the author James Atlas as
‘less is less’ (1981, p.96), which discredits this style of writing and defines it as incomplete, and therefore,
unable to tell a story to its fullest.

At first, Carver's story may give one this impression of incompleteness, as he used very short descriptions
which create a narration that seems trivial, and has the meaning of purpose (Just, 2008, p. 304), but Carver
intentionally leaves obvious clues on the table for the reader to recognize without pointing to them directly.

Rejecting the more experimental fiction of the 60s and 70s, he pioneered a precisionist realism reinventing the American
short story during the eighties, heading the line of so-called 'dirty realists' or 'K-mart realists'. Set in trailer parks and
shopping malls, they are stories of banal lives that turn on a seemingly insignificant detail. Carver writes with meticulous
economy, suddenly bringing a life into focus in a similar way to the paintings of Edward Hopper. As well as being a master
of the short story, he was an accomplished poet publishing several highly acclaimed volumes.
SUMMARY (written in 1988

Jack and his wife, Iris, are awakened at 3 a.m. by a drunk woman asking for Bud. Although they usually take the phone off
the hook--because when they first started living together, his first wife or his children used to wake them--tonight he
forgot. Iris can't fall back to sleep. She lights a cigarette and begins talking. Jack has left the phone off the hook. He goes
into the other room to unplug it. The receiver's sitting on its side. He picks it up, expecting to hear a dial tone. He says
"Hello" on an impulse. "Oh, Bud, it's you." the woman says. He hangs it up, and unplugs it. He goes back into the
bedroom, and he and Iris start talking. It gets earlier and earlier in the morning, and soon he realizes he's not going to
sleep at all. As they grown increasingly tired, their conversation takes on a more peculiar and serious tone. Iris says her
forehead sometimes pulses; he says every now and then his heart palpitates. Iris read about a man who took a shotgun
into intensive care and made the nurses unplug his father from the life-support machine. She wants to be unplugged if it
ever gets down to that. Her grandfather went into a nursing home, and didn't even recognize her mother. Iris wants to
know what she should do if Jack gets like that. And she wants him to promise he'd unplug her. He's unable to promise
he'd unplug her; he needs time to think. He doesn't want to be unplugged. He wants to stay until the very end. The alarm
clock goes off. They get out of bed, have breakfast, and go to their jobs At work, Jack's exhausted and can't stop thinking
about their conversation, and such monumental decisions. That night he tells Iris he'd unplug her. The phone rings. It's
the woman who doesn't sound drunk, asking for Bud. Jack says Bud isn't there, he'll never see Bud, never to call again.
Iris unplugs the phone.

ANALYSIS

They both are about life and things that happen on a daily basis. And struggles that we face. The differences are that
they are dealing with two separate things. The first story is about a husband and wife and her dreams and how they
think they are going to die.

It conveys a sense of immediacy by giving us the impression that the story is unfolding right before our eyes, but it also
places us in the uncomfortable position of the intruders prying into the characters’ private life, eavesdropping on their
conversation. In fact, in this short story Carver plays with our expectations by distorting the potentially romantic clichés
attached to bedroom scenes and pillow talks.

Thus, the use of the indefinite pronoun “whoever” in the title, which questions the identity of the bed’s owner, as well as
the narrator’s insistence on the messy state of the bed10 hint at a certain lack of intimacy and point to possible conjugal
problems. Jack even seems to resent his wife’s invasive presence: “she’s more on my side than her own side”.

The story itself begins and ends with metaphorical references to death, the very first sentence of the story (“The call
comes in the middle of the night, three in the morning, and it nearly scares us to death” [27]) echoing the very last one
(“The line goes dead, and I can’t hear anything” [44]) in a cyclic rhythm expressing the inevitability of death.
Therefore, it is not surprising that the couple’s central conversation (a rather unexpected type of pillow talk, as
mentioned earlier) should revolve around the concept of euthanasia, more precisely the idea of unplugging—
disconnecting—not simply a phone, but a life-support machine.

Exhaustion, spiraling.
The metaphor of his wife pulling the plug.

A struggle for couples to fight for harmony. Shows you life. The brilliance as well as the horrible. But in experiences we
can relate. Communication with humanity.

Usually 3AM phone calls is horrible.