The Friendship Theory of Fiction: "Feathers" by Ray Carver

An analysis of my favorite Carver short story.

This thing is full of spoilers, all the way through, so you should read the story first. Part II of the analysis continues here:

How Writers Create Stories From Elements: A Deep Dive Into "Feathers" by Ray Carver

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I have a theory, I call it the Friendship Theory of Fiction, that our favorite writers feel like our closest friends. Sometimes it feels like they’re perched on the blue dendrites of our brains—drinking from our emotions, diligently noting our thoughts—until we know, beyond any doubt, that at the core of our perspectives the red we see is the exact same color. Or it might feel like our favorite novelists are different, crazy even, but damn entertaining, fascinating, intriguing, bewitching, the oddball from high school that we make time to see before all others. It is the Friendship Theory of Fiction that Holden Caulfield is talking about in Catcher in the Rye when he says:

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.

And it is the Friendship Theory of Fiction that Orwell describes in Inside the Whale when praising Henry Miller:

[Y]ou feel the peculiar relief that comes not so much from understanding as from being understood. ‘He knows all about me,’ you feel; ‘he wrote this specially for me’. It is as though you could hear a voice speaking to you, a friendly American voice, with no humbug in it, no moral purpose, merely an implicit assumption that we are all alike. For the moment you have got away from the lies and simplifications, the stylized, marionette-like quality of ordinary fiction, even quite good fiction, and are dealing with the recognizable experiences of human beings.

Like a good American, I’m selling a device with this theory: the Friendship Ruler. Here stands a powerful instrument—only $59.99 while supplies last—that measures the distance between the writer and the reader. Running from zero to ten, it is one of those annoying “reverse scales,” like aperture. Zero, on the Friendship Ruler, indicates the closest kinship because it represents the smallest distance. Throughout your life, you might encounter a handful of writers that register as the all-powerful naught; when you do, it feels like life has changed on the grand scale, like the beginning of love, like the beginning of a partnership.

That’s what I felt when I first discovered Ray Carver. I remember lying in bed, wide awake at four in the morning, looking out at the gray sky, Annalisa saying, after that part let’s go to sleep. And hundreds remember my bookstore entrances, when I’d fling the door open as though I were storming a fort, then demand Ray as if I was searching out a kidnapped family member.

It’s gotten to the point where I can’t even call him Raymond anymore. It’s too formal, too stiff, as unfriendly as calling my buddy “Milk” by his Christian name. Now it’s only Ray, the pleasant man on my parents’ suburban street, born again from the ashes of a dark past. He is there on Sundays raking the leaves of his lawn; through the winter he waves to people in passing cars during his afternoon walks.

With Carver, there has never been any pretense or pretentiousness. Proud to be of the working class, he describes the world he knows in its expressions. He doesn’t scorn floridity or ten dollar words—they are just not a part of his language. Economy is. Common expressions, carefully used, are. And because he doesn’t hide behind fluff, in every sentence Ray is perennially proving that he’s real all the way through, that each of his words carry weight and hold water. They call him The American Chekhov, but to me he is something else altogether: the storyteller from time immemorial. That’s why Ray will last after all the others have gone.

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Of all of his stories, my favorites go neck and neck at the finish: The Third Thing that Killed My Father Off, What We Talk About, and Feathers. It is only because of the technology of 2024, used to prove that Noah Lyles won the one hundred this summer in Paris, that we can conclusively say Feathers triumphed outright.

When I read the first tale, I feel like I’m listening to a colleague tell a story at lunch. I’m sitting there in the break room, under harsh fluorescent lights, taking a sandwich out of some Tupperware, when a friend asks to join me. Owing to his humility, he doesn’t volunteer tales, but he cannot entirely hide them either. They lurk in his eyes, in the subtle changes of his speech—in so many small tells that betray him. But it is his secret smile, the one that escapes when it should not, that reveals he is pregnant with narrative. When you see that smile, it’s too late—you’re his audience. Now it’s your turn to coax and cajole. Now he hesitates, smiles, laughs, demurs.

“Alright, well,” he begins, clearing his throat, trying to find his footing. “This friend of mine from work, Bud, he asked Fran and me to supper.”

The start of the story is simple. Carver states the premise—two work friends will have dinner with their spouses—and follows it with two basic facts: (1) neither of them have met the other’s wife (2) Bud has a child. Then he mixes in a few poignant sentences that are easy to miss the first time through (my bolding):

That baby must have been eight months old when Bud asked us to supper. Where’d those eight months go? Hell, where’s the time gone since? I remember the day Bud came to work with a box of cigars. He handed them out in the lunchroom. They were drugstore cigars. Dutch Masters. But each cigar had a red sticker on it and a wrapper that said IT’S A BOY! I didn’t smoke cigars, but I took one anyway. “Take a couple,” Bud said. He shook the box. “I don’t like cigars either. This is her idea.” He was talking about his wife. Olla.

The nostalgia that defines Jack’s voice, and much of the story, is introduced right away. We hear a man reflecting on his life, when it was just him and his wife, when he was soused on love. He establishes this tenderness by taking you through his wistful thoughts, then speaking the famous phrase of reminiscence: “I remember…”

Throughout the story, you hear both Jack’s present perspective—that of a man disappointed with how his marriage turned out—and the past perspective he embodied when he was enamored. To take one example, when he first introduces Fran he makes her seem uptight, stressed, and stuck in her ways (present point-of-view); then, right after, his tone changes as he tries to justify her rigidity (love-drunk point-of-view):

I said, “We’re looking forward to it.” But Fran wasn’t too thrilled.

That evening, watching TV, I asked her if we should take anything to Bud’s.

“Like what?” Fran said. “Did he say to bring something? How should I know? I don’t have any idea.” She shrugged and gave me this look. She’d heard me before on the subject of Bud. But she didn’t know him and she wasn’t interested in knowing him. “We could take a bottle of wine,” she said. “But I don’t care. Why don’t you take some wine?” She shook her head. Her long hair swung back and forth over her shoulders. Why do we need other people? she seemed to be saying. We have each other. “Come here,” I said. She moved a little closer so I could hug her.

Carver throws the reader into the middle of an intimate conversation, common to couples in a rough patch. This treatment of Fran initially feels unfair, but through the story—even when more context is given—she keeps coming across in an unflattering lighter: aggressive when Jack mentions the double date; combative when he ponders the vegetables in the garden; fussy when asking Bud and Olla for drinks; bitter at the end. She is first and foremost a total bi-atch.

But there are romantic moments in there too. It’s easy to imagine Jack still lurching between these two perspectives, on a daily basis, as he tries to square how he used to find the sweetness when now she is entirely sour. If he’d written the story while it was happening—as opposed to years later with the unfortunate clarity of hindsight—he’d have spent much more on the lovey-dovey. But because he’s writing it with the full knowledge of time, we see Fran in a less rose-colored context.

The strain and nuance of his voice deepens its longing for the past, which Carver further cultivates through dreamy descriptions:

It felt good driving those winding little roads. It was early evening, nice and warm, and we saw pastures, rail fences, milk cows moving slowly toward old barns.

and through the refrain of wishing (a word used twelve times in the story), which appears for the first time on the third page:

Those times together in the evening she’d brush her hair and we’d wish out loud for things we didn’t have. We wished for a new car, that’s one of the things we wished for. And we wished we could spend a couple of weeks in Canada.

then again when Jack wishes for a house in the country; and then, finally, in one of the story’s greatest moments:

That evening at Bud and Olla’s was special. I knew it was special. That evening I felt good about almost everything in my life. I couldn’t wait to be alone with Fran to talk to her about what I was feeling. I made a wish that evening. Sitting there at the table, I closed my eyes for a minute and thought hard. What I wished for was that I’d never forget or otherwise let go of that evening. That’s one wish of mine that came true. And it was bad luck for me that it did. But, of course, I couldn’t know that then.

“What are you thinking about, Jack?” Bud said to me.

“I’m just thinking,” I said. I grinned at him.

“A penny,” Olla said.

I just grinned some more and shook my head.

In the scenes of Feathers, Fran is unaware of all of Jack’s dreams. She ignores him when he romanticizes the country. In the passage above, it’s the couple, not Fran, who ask him what he’s smiling about. And on the last page it’s Bud and him wishing together that things could be different. It’s as if she is cut from a different cloth, devoid of the hope Jack tries to cultivate.

The narrator talks about wishing wistfully, the way one thinks of childhood dreaming. The action implies that, back then, he believed that the future was open, malleable, free for them to shape according to their fantasies. But, by the end of the story, that sentiment has disappeared. They become the couple they promised themselves they’d never be, sitting around the television, hardly talking, let alone praying for new, different, or better things. Their lives are dreary and mundane; there’s little to long for in the future; the narrator speaks as if he’s trying to warm himself with past memories:

But I remember that night. I recall the way the peacock picked up its gray feet and inched around the table. And then my friend and his wife saying goodnight to us on the porch. Olla giving Fran some peacock feathers to take home. I remember all of us shaking hands, hugging each other, saying things. In the car, Fran sat close to me as we drove away. She kept her hand on my leg. We drove home like that from my friend’s house.

The sentiment is so strong that I feel his pining for days gone as if it were my own. Just as Caetano Veloso allows you to embody light-hearted Brazilian happiness through his music, just as Ernest Hemingway enables you to feel a slow hot melancholy through his novels, Ray Carver masterfully develops his flavor of longing inside of you. On my last rereading of Feathers, instead of flashing back to a period that’s passed in my life, I found myself in another one of Carver’s stories, at the dining table in What We Talk About, filled up with his experience of nostalgia.

This, my friends, is a feat that is almost impossible for a writer to achieve.

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Part II:

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Special thanks to

Lily | 5459.eth

for edits and feedback!

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