What We Talks About When We Talk About Love Analysis

Superior Essays
In the book, ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’, Carver demonstrates a consistent theme of destruction throughout a young couple’s relationship involving their different values of love, as well as the way they interact with each other and with alcohol. Carver exhibits the couple’s young love in their ‘honey-moon phase’, which the couple begins to realize does not last forever as their love begins to fade and the reality of relationships sinks in. What once was a romantic love is taking a turn for the worst.
Holly and Duane were a normal couple looking to start a new life together in a new home. Carver displays their naive hopefulness for their future together. Their love was structured and intact, similar to the hotel swimming pool.
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Carver uses a unique style to show the separation of the couple in the text. The couple’s conversations are about reminiscing on their past before their marriage was beginning to fail. In one of their conversations, Holly reflects on a trip they took to an old couple’s home. She claims, “Can you imagine us doing that now?(...) Those old people must be dead now”(28). Holly and Duane imagined their marriage to be like the old couple’s, but now she imagines the couple dead. This also symbolizes the limited amount of hope Holly has for their future, as if their marriage is also dead. Their relationship becomes more dysfunctional and Duane thinks, “I don’t have anything to say. I feel all out of words inside”(25). They no longer express their true emotions to each other in any of their conversations. They are incapable of communicating or coming up with a solution to their problems. Carver ends each of their conversation with “I go” or “Holly goes”. This enforces the theme of their destructing marriage and the separation between the couple. The language in ‘Holly goes’ represents that she is leaving and there is an end to their relationship. However, Carver does not reveal the ending of Gazebo or if their depressing love gets resolved. Holly and Duane’s last conversation in Gazebo ends with a comma. “Duane,” Holly goes”(29), Holly and Duane’s fight is left unresolved, and the language in the text …show more content…
It is present in every conversation the couple has and they begin to adapt a routine to drinking throughout their day. Duane claims, “When I look back on it, all of our important decisions have been figured out when we were drinking”(25). The couple consumes alcohol to distract themselves from the reality of their depressing love. They are always accompanied by alcohol when they attempt to have a real conversation. It contributes to their unhealthy relationship and only creates more destruction. Carver demonstrates both Holly and Duane as alcoholics considering they begin their day with whisky(21). They both seek comfort through drinking because they cannot find it with each other. Although Carver concludes the chapter with suspense alcoholics tend to have fatal outcomes which correlates to Duane and Holly’s

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