The Calm Essay

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The Calm By Raymond Carver Summary & Reaction The Calm write by Raymond Carver tells a simple story in a barbershop, but the meaning behind this story is not so simple. It’s full of choices and decisions. The story happens in a barbershop,the unnamed narrator is sitting in the barber’s chair to get a haircut. Beside the narrator and the barber Bill, there are three men in the barbershop. The narrator recognizes a man who called Charles and he is a guard of a bank. Of the other two men, one looks older and he is turning the pages of a magazine, his name is Albert. The other man is not so old and he is holding a newspaper. Then Bill asks Charles whether he got the deer. Charles answers him that he ‘did and didn’t ’ get a deer and Bill asks Charles to tell him what happened. When Charles tells his story to Bill, the other four men are listening to him as well. Charles says that he went hunting with his father and son. But his son had a hangover and he wasn’t able to hunt a deer. When the deer came up out of the underbrush, although his son shot a lot he didn’t shoot the deer. Charles shot the deer’s gut, but he didn’t kill the deer and it moved back into the brush. So they trailed the deer by the blood on the ground. But the problem was that it got too dark to trail and they gave up searching the deer. That’s why Charles tells Bill he both got the deer and he didn’t. But Charles’s father caught a young deer so they had venison that night. At the end of Charles’s story, the older man whose name is Albert tells Charles that he should be out looking for the deer instead of getting a haircut. Charles feels very angry and he begins to have an argument with Albert. Bill stops them, while the man who holds a newspaper tells them to go outside if they want to fight. That annoys Bill and he doesn’t agree with what the man says. At the end of the story, the three

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