Raymond Carver's short story "Intimacy," a poignant exploration of the relationship between an ex-husband and ex-wife, paints for the reader a picture of this ex-couple's rocky history and their current estrangement. The ex-husband narrator, a relatively well-known writer of fiction, arrives unannounced at his ex-wife's home, and she lets him in. While this scene is ordinary enough, Carver's telling of the story is unique. The story itself consists largely of dialogue; there is precious little in the way of action, setting, or exposition. In comparison to most fiction, the proportions of this dialogue are highly skewed: the ex-wife unequivocally dominates the story's conversation, and the ex-husband initially appears to be a victim of her verbal abuse. Accompanying the distorted dialogue, the dearth of concrete objects gives "Intimacy" an empty, vague atmosphere in which readers get few details with which to kindle their imaginations.
In his work on linguistic discourse analysis, James Paul Gee discusses the relationship between current conversations (what is now being said) and past conversations (what was once said) through two concepts. (3) One is intertextuality, that property of texts that links them to previous texts, those that have come before (55). The other idea is one of Gee's own: he conceptualizes "little-c" conversation to specify the current dialogue/interaction and "big-c" Conversation to specify the history, development, and dynamism of ongoing conversations that have led up to the current one (13, 34-37). (4) The verbal interaction between ex-husband and ex-wife in Carver's story is their "little-c" conversation:
monika after story dialogue
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