Stoic Sediment

I have taken to poetry in an attempt to explain my opinion about what is quintessentially American in Raymond Carver’s ‘So Much Water So Close to Home’. At first reading I was not convinced of much but after spending some time I realise in this short story so much of the typical Hollywood blockbuster films so present in my youth. In the story is the mainstream American ideal I witnessed time and again in these movies centred around a heroic patriotic American man, cool and silent, and the woman who gives it her all but inevitably twists her ankle and needs to be ‘carried’ by the man. I believe that the corpse and the wife become one in this story as they are both treated with denial, darkness and violence.