Thesis-Driven Essay on Three Short Stories

Raymond Carver , Denis Johnson and Michael Cunningham put forth very similar views of reality in their short stories . All of the three texts give an intimation of spirituality , but what is interesting is that the characters have visions , perform miracles and understand truths without actually living a mystical experience or having a religious ecstasy Both the narrators and the characters in the story are misfits and drug abusers and they perform , witness and write about miracles in a befuddled , semi-conscious state of mind . What the authors are trying to transmit therefore is

not the fact that there is a spiritual world somewhere beyond the immediate , apparent world but that the tangible daily reality is strange and ungraspable , ever bing on the spiritual universe . Thus , the ordinary reality itself is a miraculous unstable and elusive world . Also , the miracles that are performed and the visions that are seen are neither elevated nor precise , and do not have a clear meaning . In this way , the three authors manage to make the daily , objective life seem unfamiliar and altogether different from what it is usually supposed to be . Moreover , miracles are themselves neutralized so that they seem less unwonted or unexpected . Through a double procedure then , the concrete reality and the spiritual miraculous meet in the stories to describe our own world as a different unfamiliar place

The three short fictions have a few elements in common besides the theme : a similar symbolism , a similar tone that suggests a waking dream mood , and similar misfit characters , all in a stupefied state because of the drug abuse . In Johnson 's Emergency , the boundaries between the spiritual and the actual reality are completely erased . First of all the nameless narrator is writing while he is under the influence of drugs and thus even confesses his unreliability and confusion with regard to the real ' events . Language thus fails to deliver the truth about what has happened . Reality appears to be mutable and relative When describing the love-making that he overhears , for example , the narrator declares in all certainty that he can hear the noise of the bedsprings : I couldn 't hear what they were saying , but I heard the bedsprings , I was sure of that , and her lovely cries (Johnson , 154 ) A little later though he realizes that the love scene had not taken place on a bed at all , so he only thought he heard the bedsprings : they 'd never made it to the bed . They were standing upright . Not passionately twining . More likely they were fighting (Johnson , 155 ) Through this device , Johnson does not merely intend to make us aware of the unreliability of the story teller , but actual to point to the unreliability of men in general to perceive reality in any correct way . In fact , he emphasizes this himself , by announcing that reality doesn 't matter : Or maybe that wasn 't the time it snowed . Maybe it was the time we slept in the truck .It doesn 't matter (Johnson , 84 Thus...