Silence And Speaking

Raymond Carver is one of the important figures in the renaissance of American short fiction in the 1980 s.He is good at using plain language and objective narration to describe daily trifles of common herd,which makes him known as “the middle-class Chekhov of America”.Carver's works concentrate on the embarrassing and tough situation of the lower class,showing their confusion and hopelessness when they are facing reality.He is a writer who can find meanings from tedious and ordinary life and express his thought of existence through unique description.Carver is a member of the blue-collar workers;therefore what he writes is what he experiences before.Carver's characters are ordinary people who lack hope and emotion,indulge in alcohol,sit in front of the television and lose their voice in social power structure.However,in Carver's later works,he makes his characters break the communication barriers,which impresses readers with their hope of making progress.This thesis tries to analyze the silence and speaking in Carver's eight stories in Michel Foucault's view of power of discourse,which helps to explore the deep meaning and reason of silence and speaking and the humanistic thought and spirit caring of Carver from three aspects of discourse crisis,discourse distortion and discourse construction.These stories are “Feathers”,“Preservation”,“The Compartment”,“They Are Not Your Husband”,“Neighbors”,“Where I'm Calling from”,“Fever”,and “Cathedral”.On the one hand,they are Carver's representative works in his different creating periods,showing his experience of writing;on the other hand,characters in these stories face difficulties in speaking and getting their power for a long time even for their whole life.Besides the introduction and conclusion,this thesis mainly consists of three chapters.The first chapter analyzes discourse crisis among friends,couples and father and son under the influence of living plight.With the heavy burden of reality,people lose their identity when communicating with those close to them,which makes them silent and forms the barriers both in real life and spiritual world.The second chapterconcerns people who change their thought and pick up voice of others.Although they do not become silent in power confrontation,they are influenced by others and lose their original discourse and thought with the discipline of truth and power.The third chapter applies technologies of self to analyze the discourse construction in oppressing circumstance.In Cathedral,some characters reach the stage of consciousness awakening through technologies of listening and narration while some achieve the goal of communication construction.Discourse plays an important role in the process of getting people's subjectivity and power.The world we live in is full of power which dominates individual's behavior and discourse.The lower class is under the control of power which influences their discourse.At the same time,discourse constructs their power.When facing the reality,the blue-collar workers feel depressive,despaired and hopeless and never know how to get out from their failure.As the spokesman of the lower class,Carver concerns their living condition and gives them hope to get their power in his fictions,showing his deep feeling for them.