Raymond Carver Alcoholism

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Thesis Statement: In “So Much Whisk(E)Y So Far From Home: Misogyny, Violence, And Alcoholism In Raymond Carver's ‘Where I'm Calling From,” Laurie Champion thinks that the focus is on Carver's alcoholism and the subject of alcoholism that centers on his work, which leads to the ultimate question whether Carver depicts both the spiritual ills of alcoholism and the spiritual rebirth of the recovery process.
Champion states that the main conflict in "Where I'm Calling From," is Carver's own alcoholism. The ways to know that people deny that they are being alcoholics are the desire to be alone and refusal to communicate with other alcoholics (236), and the willingness to listen to stories of other alcoholics and reluctant to share their own experiences (236). For writers, it is very easy to know that they are alcoholics with the patterns of repetitive images and plot structure (236), and their mode of writing parallels (236). Champion thinks that Carver was concerned with alcoholism and he understood the "talking cure" for alcoholism. Craver also depicted alcoholism not only as a minor object in his work but as a major subject. In the story, alcohol abuse is a major subject. She notes that Carver demonstrates this when J.P. was described as …show more content…
as an alcoholic suggests that Carver consciously associated alcoholism with marital discord and abusive treatment of women. J.P. abused his wife and the narrator also abused his wife emotionally by cheating on her. Champion also thinks that in Carver's depictions of alcoholism, he realistically illustrates sequences of disrupted lives and alcohol abuse (247). Alcohol, as portrayed in the story, is a means of relieving problems (247). Alcoholics usually drink to escape problems. As suggested by J.P., the narrator of the title of the story, alcoholics must seek both therapy and abstinence to control and break the chain of alcohol consumption.
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