Raymond Carver's Neighbors

“He remembered when Harriet had come home with the clock, how she had crossed the hall to show it to Arlene, cradling the brass case in her arms and talking to it through the tissue paper as if it were an infant” (Carver 8). Bill Miller recalls this memory of Arlene and the clock when he enters the Stone’s apartment in the 1970 short story “Neighbors” by Raymond Carver. Bill and Arlene Miller have agreed to watch the apartment of their neighbors, Jim and Harriet Stone, and their activities inside their friend’s living space is outright snoopy and slightly voyeuristic. Carver compliments the Miller’s outlandish behavior with a minimalist format that focuses the audience attention on the Stone’s household items, like a clock. The reoccurring …show more content…
A radical aspect of this form of time is the perception of speed, according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The duration of minutes that will pass in psychological time appears to move quickly according to our “internal clock” (Mastin), this is due to the human’s enjoyment in an engaging activity. Since I believe that brainpower is a complex subject matter, let’s look at the article “Exactly What is…TIME?” to further break down the notion of psychological time. “When the brain receives new information from the outside world, the raw data does not necessarily arrive in the order needed to process it properly. The brain therefore reorganizes the information and presents it in a more easily understandable form” (Mastin). This phenomenon appears active in “Neighbors” when Arlene states to Bill, “You’ve been over here more than an hour” (Carver 10), and Bill responds, “Have I really?” Arlene has taken our earlier advice in this essay and is now talking to Bill in terms of proper time. On the other hand, Bill finds such great delight in stealing cigarets from the Stones, eating and sniffing their food from the fridge and looking opening the kitchen cupboards that he is unable to correctly calculate how many minutes he has spent on repulsive activities. Consequently, if the Miller’s desire intelligent conversations about time, …show more content…
As the time ruler in “Neighbors,” Carver manipulates how the story and characters flow with the use of his creative time measurement words as seen in this example, “He moved slowly through each room considering everything that fell under his gaze, carefully, one object at a time” (Carver 11). Let’s stop for a moment and consider the use of the word slowly in this quote. Replacing it with a proper time measurement should make Bill’s inspection of the Stone’s belonging in this section very lethargic. On the other side, replacing slowly with psychological time measurement should speed up all of Bill’s bizarre actions and reassemble the pieces non-sequentially. Above all, I believe Raymond Carver uses the narrator in “Neighbors” as the ultimate time measurement and even though Carver time is not scientifically legitimate it has merit in this short