Raymond Carver, "Beginners" and "Why Don't You Dance?"

In Raymond Carver’s two stories, “Beginners” and “Why Don’t You Dance?”, the subject is love. In “Beginners”, there are 4 people, 2 couples, who are having drinks together and the topic of love comes up. They all talk about how they got to be where they are now and their past relationships. Herb McGinnis, a cardiologist, thought that real love was that of the spiritual love. His wife, Terri, starts to tell of how she was in an abusive relationship. The other couple seemed to be the one that had the normal relationship. In “Why Don’t You Dance?” a man is having a garage sale and has the furniture set in the same way as it was inside the house. A young couple comes along and starts to look around, finally settling on buying the TV and the bed. The couple and the man all get drunk and then dance to a record player in the yard. The girl tries to tell everyone about what happened but for some reason, she wasn’t able to talk about it. So in both Carver’s stories, the subject definitely has a connection to love and the relationships we encounter in our lives.
Even though I have a hard time wrapping my head around this, I think the aspect of collective cultural ideology that Carver is examining is the role of relationships in our lives and what is expected of us. There are certain milestones that we all “should” reach by a certain age. Those milestones include: finishing education, leaving home, getting a job and become financially stable, getting married, and having kids. Of course, this is what shapes the American Dream. We all are also expected to be happy forever after if we do this right. But in these two stories, this is not the case. In “Beginners”, these are not the relationships that we think about having in our future. Herb has already had a failed marriage and he thinks about how he had managed to love his ex-wife one day but now hates her completely. Terri, his current wife, was in a terrible situation before meeting Herb. She had lived with a man, Carl, who beat her up constantly and threatened to kill her as well as Herb. His reason for his actions was because he loved Terri very much. This is not the type of love that we see advertised in movies and romance novels but even Terri herself confirms that he loved her. As a society, we do not approve of abusive relationships and that would turn into a scandal. But in this case, Terri openly talks about it and actually admits that sometimes she thinks about him. She argues with Herb that Carl loved her very much but in his own way. While I was reading this, I felt terrible for Terri and sorry for Herb. At the end of the story, Terri breaks down and tells the other couple that Herb has been suicidal recently. There’s a lot that could be said regarding this issue. Herb is what many of us wish to be when we are at his age. He is a successful cardiologist, and of course he is making tons of money. So he has already reached all those milestones that are expected of him. But he is not happy, his relationship with his ex-wife is draining him, and he misses his kids. This proves that even if we play our expected roles in society correctly, it does not mean that we will be happy.
In “Why Don’t You Dance?” the man is selling the furniture that used to belong to him and another woman. We don’t know what happened to their relationship, whether he was married or not, or where the woman is now. A significant part in this story is when the man and the young girl have a dance together. As they get close together, the young girl tells him that there are people watching them. The man tells her that it’s okay since this is his yard. As they dance, they become aware of each other and something definitely passes between them. The man says, “I hope you like your bed” and as the young girl pulls him closer and buries her head in his shoulder, she replies, “You must be desperate or something”. A couple of weeks later, the young girl cannot explain what happened back there at the yard sale but still tries to describe the situation to her friends. I really didn’t understand the point in this story but I know it has something to do with what happened between the man and the young girl. In the society we live in today, we sometimes do see an old man with a girl who is younger than him by way more than a few years. To be honest, we will question such a relationship more than we would wonder about a couple who seem to be in the same social circle.
I think the point of these two stories is that Carver wants to prove that not everyone is able to live their lives according to what society expects from them. We are not able to control who we fall in love with or who we come across in our lives. Carver showed that even we go according to our roles, we can still be unhappy, such as in Herb’s situation. He achieved all the milestones, so one would think he would be “stable”, but in reality, he’s not. The young girl in the second story is supposed to be in love with her boyfriend, and she is, but something did pass between her and the older man. Society would probably disapprove, but Carver showed that this is something we cannot control.