“They are not your husband” is a short story written by Raymond Carver. The story is written in the third person and is about a man called Earl Ober, who is an unemployed salesman, and his wife (Doreen) who works at a twenty-four-hour coffee shop. After a night out drinking (as usual) he decides to stop by the coffee shop to see his wife’s working place and to get something to eat, hoping he could have it on the house. At the coffee shop, he is being treated like any other costumer. This night, Earl hears two men talking about his wife’s overweight, which bothers Earl so greatly that he leaves his food almost untouched.
The day after the episode at the coffee shop, Earl makes his wife believe she needs to lose weight, but really it is Earl who has a problem with her overweight since he has not complained about it before. She ruins her first try at a diet with bacon and scrambled eggs for breakfast, but he makes her try again. Doreen ends up looking unhealthy and pale, but Earl keeps pressuring her to stay on the diet and keep trying. At the end of the story Earl is trying to sell his wife to another costumer saying, “Don’t you think she is something special? and the other costumer glances at Doreen, but then continues to read his newspaper. Doreen ends up telling everyone at the coffee shop “he’s a salesman. He’s my husband”. We see the lack of benevolence between Earl and Doreen. At the beginning when Earl walks into the coffee shop all he gets is a “what are you doing here? ” and later “don’t talk to me, I’m busy”. Earl feels deeply mortified with the two men describing his wife in the negative tone. He might have been sleeping throughout their marriage, and when he finally wakes and sees his wife, he sees her through another pair of glasses, he sees her as the two men do.
Clearly, he has not seen the couple of extra pounds earlier on in the marriage, but now they suddenly matter to him. We do not hear about the children in a normal way, they are like shadows in front of the TV. They do not eat together like any normal family would do, and they are not there all the time like other children might have been. The marriage between Doreen and Earl seems to be without love, as we do not hear about the two of them having a special moment together, like telling each other about their love for the partner.
Earlier in their life, when they found each other, they probably realized that they would not be able to do better in life with someone else. As Doreen begins to lose more and more weight, she also starts looking ill and she tells Earl that her colleagues at work have been commenting negatively on her weight loss, but Earl will not hear any of it and responds “they’re not your husband”. The response is double standard, because we can shift to Doreen’s point of view where Earl’s whole reason for the diet is the fact that somebody other than himself talked badly about his wife, therefore she could give the exact same respond to Earl.
Double standards are very much a given theme in this novel, because they come flying from left and right all the time, and also it is implemented in the title of the short story. Earl is a salesman and that might be the cause of him trying to sell his wife to another man or maybe because he is an unemployed salesman and needs to make a go at selling her, in order to prove to himself that he is still able to do his thing. The sale Earl is making through the novel, ends up making Doreen able to see what Earl’s true intentions are, and that might be what leads her to her final conclusion that he is just a salesman.
I have been reading about Raymond Carver and therefore I know about his style and I am able to conclude that this truly is one of his short stories. He is a minimalistic writer and that truly matches the story. The themes (love, lack of benevolence and looking great on the outside instead of the inside) Raymond Carver is disposed to using in the short stories are negative themes, but they are realistic. The family he is describing in “they’re not your husband” is a typical middle class family in the United States of America.
The style of writing is very modern and gets straight to the point. There are not many describing words to set the scene, characters or mood of the story. Raymond Carver is just telling you how it is. He does not get into the characters? emotions, and does not truly capture what they are feeling. We understand what the characters are like, but we do not understand their actions. Raymond Carver does not have his focus on why the plot in the short story happens. His aim is to get the plot of the story out to the reader.
