What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

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“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”, by Raymond Carver is a short story about understanding the idea of what love really is. Love is expressed through someones sensation; it can be explained through a narrator’s point of view and the communication between the characters. In this story Mel is one of the narrator narrating the story along with Nick, while all them are trying to understand the meaning of love. Mel and his wife Terri have a discussion about love while, Laura and Nick silently communicate about love through physical gestures. No matter how much the characters discuss about love, the meaning of love remains unanswered. MEANING OF THE TITLE! Mel tries many times to approach the meaning of love, but he doesn’t succeed to understand it. He discusses about the old couple to his friends who were almost killed in an accident and that the old man was depressed that he was not able to his wife because they were in two separate rooms trying to proof his point to others whether that was love. Terri explains that Ed really loved her even when he was abusive, while Mel disagrees with her. Terri said that Ed drank poison when she had left him, but Ed still survived but later died by shooting himself. Terri believes that Ed died for true love, while Mel disagrees with her. After Terri kept telling everyone that Ed loved her no matter how abusive their relationship was, and then Mel admits that he wants to kill his wife, “he wishes she’d get married again. Or else die” (Carver 158). Mel grows hate towards his ex-wife, he says, “there was a time when I thought I loved my first wife” (Carver 154) implying that he never really loved her and understood what love was in order to know if he really had love towards her. Mel mentions, “What happened to that love?” (Carver 154) after he says that he hates his ex-wife, and then later connects it back to Ed, says that he
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