Writing Of Characters With Disabilities In Raymond Carver’s Fiction

Raymond Carver is a well-known American short story writer in the 1970 s and 1980 s. The research objects of this thesis are the texts from his self-selected short story collection Where I’m Calling From. This paper attempts to take the perspective of literary disability research, that is integrating the literary researches with the disability studies to interpret those characters with disabilities in those stories helping the readers better understand the author’s appeals and concerns behind his portray of disability. The research also helps readers to better understand the author and those characters with disabilities in his works.The organization of the dissertation and the major contents are planned as follows:Chapter one is a brief introduction of Carver’s life and works, current domestic and foreign studies on his works. The majority of researches at home and abroad try to interpret the works of Carver from the angles of writing techniques of minimalism, interpretations of existentialism and symbolism, and studies on story’s endings. However, few people have studied his works from the perspective of literary disability studies, which can verify the feasibility for the author to conduct a research on the characters with disabilities in his works.Chapter two provides a general definition of literary disability studies, and some relevant issues concerning this term, such as major characteristics of literary disability studies which includes the adoption of disability as a metaphor, transferring the author’s own experience to the description of the disabled characters as well as the tendency to conduct a profound research on a certain period and a specific writer emerging in literary disability studies.Chapter three on the basis of textual close reading is a discussion of how the author depicts in his fiction his own disability experience, disabled individuals he encounters in his life and the changes of the characters with disabilities through the application of literary disability study.Chapter four is a summarization of the author’s three writing models of disability, which are writing on the disability which conforms to the traditional definition, writing on his own experience of being the disabled and writing on disability itself, in order to explore the author’s true objectives behind his description on disability.Chapter five is a conclusion of this thesis. Carver derives inspirations from his life and his own shortcomings are in the resonance with those of “imperfect persons” in the real life. The writer seems to have transferred his own experience to the description of the disabled characters in his works, leaving a deep impression on the readers’ mind.