Presentation of Love in Sleep by Murakami and Cathedral by Carver - Essay Example

Literature is full of different love stories. It is difficult to depict love relationships in detail in literature making them real-like. Writers have many choices as their stories can have happy or dramatic ends; however, it is up to they need to develop their individual style of writing in order to make their presentations of love unique. Sleep by Haruki Murakami and Cathedral by Raymond Carver are two famous short stories which address the theme of love relationships in their plots. Both of them show family life of two different couples; however, their relationships are represented from different perspectives. The use of different narrative perspectives and techniques explain these two family stories in depth engaging readers and making them sympathetic towards characters in these stories. Carver’s Cathedral written in 1983 is considered to be the best story of the writer. The plot of the short story is unusual; a blind man visits a family of his female friend after the death of his wife. The story is narrated by the husband whose name is not mentioned in the story. His wife looks very happy when she expects Robert to come; the narrator does not understand her feelings because he is disturbed by the blindness of their guest. At the same time, the narrator is blind to feelings of his own wife (Wiederhold 100). Their married life is already dull; they exchange only some short phrases where the wife expresses her dissatisfaction and the husband does not care, “If you love me," she said, "you can do this for me. If you don't love me, okay. But if you had a friend, any friend, and the friend came to visit, I'd make him feel comfortable”. Carver resorts to existential in his narration (Seemann 76). He addresses such dilemmas as freedom and marriage, looking and seeing, living and existing. He describes only actions and does not represent any feelings directly telling about them. Readers are supposed to see them between the lines. Form the narrator’s point of view, friendship between Robert and his wife is weird. They record audio tapes and send them to each other telling stories of their lives to each other. They treat each other with warm and carrying attitude trying to make everything possible to make each other happy and comfortable. The narrator is surprised to see how cheerfully his wife smiles when she meets Robert. In his eyes, Robert is a man who cannot experience love because he is blind. Their tapes look innocent to the narrator who does not see that a strange blind man really knows his wife and cares about her. Narrator’s wife tries to communicate with her husband, but their communication is not effective. For instance, he recollects that “She told me he touched his fingers to every part of her face, her nose--even her neck! She never forgot it. She even tried to write a poem about it”, but he does not try to understand why his wife feels that way (Carver). Moreover, she has already tried to commit suicide when she felt unhappy in her marriage. She is a sensitive person and she needs some warmth and understanding which her husband cannot give her. According to Zarranz, the narrator and his wife challenge traditional roles in a marriage. While man is represented as a totally passive and anti-social personality because he does not have any friends and does not want any guests to come. His wife is active socially as she invites her friend and organizes everything to keep him comfortable. Relationships between wife and Robert are more than a friendship; they can be referred as a companionate love where people treat each other with affection and tenderness because “their lives are deeply connected” (Jungsik and Hatfield 174). According to Lehman, Carver ends the story with an optimistic note that the narrator will change. Drawing a cathedral with Robert he approached a real emotional connection with him. It gives an optimistic prognosis for narrator’s ability to understand his wife. According to Matsuoka, Murakami admires Carver and uses some elements of his realistic style in his works (423). Murakami’s short story Sleep is narrated by a female character; it makes it radically different from Carver’s Cathedral. The narrator focuses on self-reflections about her feelings, her life in marriage and her attitude to her husband. Unlike Carver, Murakami prefers to talk about feelings directly. For instance, she says “And I’m fond of him, of course. I think I even love him. But strictly speaking, I don’t actually like him.”(Murakami) The couple experiences the same issue addressed in Carver’s Cathedral which is a lack of emotional connection and understanding between spouses. Crisis in their relationships is motivated by lack of communication. Narrator’s husband spends the whole day at work; he comes home to have a lunch and go to sleep. The spouses are deeply tied together by the circumstances of their lives. They were young when they married and they had to survive together. They have a big bank loan and have to pay for it together. Their life is the same every day; even the words they say to each other are always the same. As well as the narrator in the Cathedral, the husband in Sleep is emotionally blind. He is not interested in the books his wife reads and he creates the rules which she should follow. For instance, she likes chocolate but her husband does not like it and they never buy it. The narrator claims that her husband is “ugly” and “arrogant”; this feature is typical for all his relatives. Husbands from Cathedral and Sleep are both passive. Wives treat their husbands as objects; for instance, the narrator in Sleep mentions that “it’s more fun to eat with my husband than all alone” because she needs somebody to talk to. Despite perfectly organized household which persuades the narrator that they are “still happy, of course. I really do think so. No domestic troubles cast shadows on our home” (Murakami). She becomes unhappy because her daily life is predetermined by daily routines and lacks any diversity. Her husband does not notice any changes in his wife. He never tells her any compliments and thinks that she has to be happy that he still pays attention to her. At the same time, their little family joke about attractiveness of the husband is often speculated in a family. In it notable that both stories represent love as reflections and experience of only one character, not both of them, switching ordinary dialectics to postmodern reflective monologue (Shepherdson 90). Characters in Cathedral still have chance that their relationships will become better. Murakami cuts a happy end from the story leaving it open. According to Yeung, Murakami often resort to equivocal final scenes in his love stories (279). Narrator’s husband shows no signs of interest in the story; there are almost no chances that he can change and try to understand his wife. Every day without sleep results in bigger distance between two spouses because the narrator is learning how she can be more independent in her marriage. She likes reading more than sleeping with her husband. Perhaps, she does not sleep because she needs some distance from her daily routine where there is no place for her needs. Overall, women in both stories experience anxiety related to failures in their life in a family. Still, Cathedral has a happy end which Sleep displays no signs of change in male characters. In summary, Cathedral and Sleep have many things in common. They depict depressed women and emotionally blind husbands in two different families. Lack of emotional connection and intimate communication in both families makes spouses cold. Relationships in both stories lack warmth and interest in each other. The representation of love is different because Carver tends to write from the male point of view. His character only looks at things but he does not see them. Murakami’s female narrator relies on her feelings and thoughts about family life while her husband remains passive and ignorant to changes. These two stories show that failure to communicate in a family leads to misunderstanding which can ruin lives of both spouses. Works Cited Carver, Raymond. Cathedral. 1983. Web. June 17, 2014. http://www.nbu.bg/webs/amb/american/6/carver/cathedral.htm Jungsik, Kim and Elaine Hatfield. "Love Types and Subjective Well-Being: A Cross-Cultural Study." Social Behavior and Personality: An International Journal 32.2 (2004):173-182. Lehman, Daniel W. "Symbolic Significance in the Stories of Raymond Carver."Journal of the Short Story in English. Les Cahiers de la nouvelle 46 (2006): 75-88. Matsuoka, Naomi. "Murakami Haruki and Raymond Carver: The American Scene." Comparative literature studies (1993): 423-438. Murakami, Haruki. Sleep. In The Elephant Vanishes. Vintage eBooks. 1993. Web. June 16, 2014 < http://ptchanculto.binhoster.com/books/-Lit-%20Recommended%20Reading/Japanese%20Literature/Murakami,%20Haruki/Murakami,%20Haruki%20-%20The%20Elephant%20Vanishes.pdf> Seemann, Brian. "Existential Connections". The Raymond Carver Review 1. (2007):75-92. Shepherdson, Charles. "Telling Tales of Love: Philosophy, Literature, and Psychoanalysis." Diacritics 30.1 (2000): 89-105. Wiederhold, Eve. "A Feminist Re-Vision of the Work of Interpretation in Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral”. The Raymond Carver Review 2.(2009):96-115 Yeung, Virginia. "Equivocal Endings and the Theme of Love in Murakami Haruki’s Love Stories." Japanese Studies 33.3 (2013): 279-295. Zarranz, Libe García. "Passionate Fictions: Raymond Carver and Feminist Theory." The Raymond Carver Review 2. (2009):20-32. Read More