| Raymond Carver(1938-1988),one of the greatest American novelist in 20 th century,praised as the most influential short story writer after Hemingway.Caver shows the survival status of the American blue collar in minimalism,infusing new power to American realistic novels recovery in 1980 s.The major scholar William Stull believes that failure of communication is forever theme in Caver short fiction.Caver’s characters tend to be so inarticulated that they can’t achieve the true communication through their vague and pale words.The language of Caver’s fiction is full of “indeterminacy” and “menace”,if regarding writing as the process of the author exchanges with his readers,Caver applies narrative strategy to making readers fall into communicative predicament in text.This thesis divides into 3 parts.The first part mainly researches into Carver’s typical short stories to analyze three specific forms of “communicative predicament” of Caver’s characters;The second part shows the psychological and sociological causes of “communicative predicament”: the characters in Caver’s fiction are usually caught in self-identity crisis,unabled to get warmth and comfort from any group.They strongly feel the lack of intimacy in their life,but can’t get it out in language or body contact to establish close link with others,trapped in deeper solitude.Besides,Caver’s books is also named as “TV Fiction”,whose blue-collar characters’ main communicative object is TV in the 1970 s and 1980 s,so the existence of TV squishes their communicative space.The last part focuses on rhetorical strategy,analysis on how Carver utilizes unrealiable narrative and elliptical techniques to make the text filled with indeterminacy,making it difficult for readers to understand the story and experience the same “communicative predicament”. |
