The Poetic of the fragment: Raymond Carver and social class

Abstract

Short stories by Raymond Carver depict working-class characters, routinely afflicted with adversities like unemployment, alcoholism, and divorce, in unusually brief and uncompromisingly descriptive narratives that give the impression of loose fragments incapable of cohering into integrated works of fiction. This study examines Carver's narrative style as a distinctive type of literary poetic that produces its own kind of coherence and integration. Rooted in the material constraints of the blue-collar environment in which Carver lived and wrote, his poetic of the fragment does not passively replicate these constraints but actively appropriates them to develop a unique form of storytelling.