Interpretation Post

In Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love,” Carver exemplifies the nature of love and the inadequacy of language when describing love. In the story, the core of the plot takes place over a course of an evening. The characters, Nick and Laura, and Mel and Terri McGinnis, sit around the kitchen table at the McGinnis’ apartment, drinking gin and talking, before they all go out to dinner together. The only movement around the table during the involved the characters getting up to get more gin.” Mel is divorced, and Terri is his second wife. Terri is also divorced and Mel is her second husband. Mel and Terri have been married for four years, together for five. Nick and Laura are married, and have been together only eighteen months. Collectively, all of these characters, their stories, their experiences with “love” help portray that love is truly more than words.

Summary
“As the story opens, the narrator explains that “The gin and tonic water kept going around, and we somehow got on the subject of love.” Mel, who had once gone to seminary school, claims that “real love was nothing less than spiritual love.” They then begin to discuss Terri’s former husband, Ed, who was physically abusive to her, had threatened Mel on several occasions, and eventually shot himself in the head, dying three days later. Mel argues that that is not real love, while Terri insists that Ed did love her. While Nick and Laura’s relationship seems to be completely harmonious, and their interactions with each other kind and affectionate, Mel and Terri’s interactions take on a tone of controlled menace, barely covering a deep-seated resentment between the two of them.

The conversation continues on the subject of love while Mel becomes increasingly drunk. He gives an example of what he considered to be “real love.” He tells them about an elderly couple who had gotten into a terrible car accident when they were hit by a teenage boy. Both of them nearly died, but they continued to survive, although both were covered from head to toe in bandages. Mel explains that, one day, the old man explained to him in tears that he was upset that, although he and his wife’s beds were next to each other in the hospital room, he could not turn his head to see her face, because of his bandages. Mel is taken with the idea that this man loved his wife so much it was nearly killing him not to be able to look at her: “I mean, it was killing the old fart just because he couldn’t look at the ... woman.”

Mel, now clearly drunk, decides that he’d like to call and talk to his kids, who live with his ex-wife, Marjorie. He explains that Marjorie is allergic to bee stings, and part of him would like to appear at her front door and release a swarm of bees into her house. But he is baffled that he feels such hatred for her now, when he knows that he did once truly love her. Mel then decides against calling his children, and all four finish off the last of the gin. Mel erratically turns his glass of gin upside, allowing it to spill all over the table. “Gin’s gone,” he says. “Now what?” Terri responds. At this point the narrator ends the story with a description of the four friends, sitting in silence around the table: “I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone’s heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, no one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.” “

Interpretation
One of the most important aspects of this story is the elusiveness of love. Despite the characters efforts to come up with a tangible definition of love, the nature of love is left undefined. One of the best examples of this is when Mel tells his friends about a couple who almost died in a car crash, but the conclusion only leaves his friends confused. And the conversation then turns into a discussion about how strange it is that they have all loved more than one person. Mel basically babbles on and on. He does the majority of the talking in this story, and I believe this symbolizes his own confusion on loves. He is trying so hard to prove that he knows love that his ramblings only convey his loss of words to truly describe what it is.

Likewise, Terri is so sure in her definition of love that she gets lost in her beliefs. She even seems the most certain out of all of her friends in the definition of love. She claims that her ex-boyfriend loved her through acts of violence. This seems unrealistic to us, but Terri made herself believe that he truly loved her. However, when Mel challenged her beliefs the only thing she would fall back on was her intuition. She could not provide any certainty in her explanation on love.
Laura and Nick are a little bit different. They also believe they understand the nature of love but they say it in fewer words than Terri and Mel. They merely demonstrate their love through physical gestures in hopes that this will clarify where words cannot.

All four characters are continuously drinking throughout this exploration for a definite definition of love. However, I believe that the alcohol represents more than just that. The more they drink the more they become intoxicated. This mirrors their varying descriptions of love. As the story unfolds, and larger amounts of gin are consumed, the more confusion roams in the story until they are all left silent by the end of the story....but only first by finishing off the gin.

Carver depicts through varying discussions and symbols that words are not enough when addressing love.