Department of English and American Studies

Philoshophical Faculty
Palacký University in Olomouc

Final Essay:
The Problem of Social Isolation in Raymond
Craver’s ‘Why Don’t You Dance?’

Barbora Daníčková F13958

English Philology ‒ History

Mgr. Michal Kleprlík

KAA/AJC1 Jazyková cvičení 1
6th January 2014
 This essay focuses on Raymond Carver’s short story Why Don’t You
Dance (1978), in particular on interpretation of social behavior of the main
characters in the story. The following paragraphs seek to demonstrate how life
changes affect people’s mind and manners, primarily described on the attitude of
the protagonist.
This story has an interesting choice of characters even though it is very
short one. The first lines introduce the main character, an older man, who is
watching his front yard full of furniture originally from the house. It is clear since
the first paragraph that the man is lonely and he thinks about his past. There is
also another important character—his wife who is playing a big role in this story,
but she is absent. She is only in his thoughts. Also the furniture plays a symbolic
role, because it reminds the protagonist of his wife.
Through the whole story we are not sure about a few things. Firstly, there
is an obscurity about the current state of the relationship between the man and his
wife. Also the furniture is in front of the house because he is selling it, but why?
Mainly, we do not know where his wife is. It is apparent they are not longer
together, but we can only assume what happened. In the beginning it is said about
the furniture: “Except for that, things looked much the way they had in the
bedroom - nightstand and reading lamp on his side of the bed, nightstand and
reading lamp on her side. His side, her side” (1). When reading this, we feel that
the man is noticeably sad about the absence of his wife. Is she dead? Did they
divorce? We do not know, but the sadness is obvious and determines the man’s
behavior later in the story.
A twist comes when two young people appear. The man finds them in the
front yard when he returns from a shop. They were looking for things for their
apartment. He starts to talk with them. We can see the man’s lack of interest from
their communication. It seems as he wants to move on from what happened to the
relationship with his wife and it is shown in the third page, where the man does
not care about the profit of the sold furniture. “ ‘I want the desk,’ the girl said. 
‘How much money is the desk?’ The man waved his hand at this preposterous
question. ‘Name a figure,’ he said” (3). It is interesting that he sells the furniture
for a smaller price than he firstly intended to, without any disappointment. He
seems satisfied after he makes the deal with the girl. This might be interpreted in
two ways: we feel desperation as a hidden urgency after contact with someone or

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it is simply the man’s hopeless interest for selling the things from the house as
soon as possible to get rid of memories.
The story goes on and we witness another twist. All of them start to drink
whiskey. The man is getting more and more careless about the things from his
past as he almost forces the pair to buy more of the stuff. In the end, he tells them
to dance and they do.
An unusual connection arises between the protagonist and the girl when
the she later starts to dance with him, quietly, without any words. Daniel W.
Lehman stated: “Carver won’t furnish her with the words, but he does furnish his
reader with the symbolic structures that will make sense of that silence.”1
Although it is not clear what is going on between them, the girl seems as she
somehow understands the man’s motives.
They danced and he felt her breath on his neck. In this moment, we
sympathize with the man who was longing for a social contact, for some
satisfaction: “The girl closed and then opened her eyes.  She pushed her face into
the man's shoulder. She pulled the man closer. ̒You must be desperate or
something,’ she said” (4). From these sentences, the connection is now clear. The
girl is somehow trying to help the man. She feels his needs and her drunken mind
lets her do things she probably normally would not do. She feels sorry for a
stranger and she shares a special moment with him.
The last paragraph shows the girl’s thoughts a few weeks later. She says:
“ ‘The old guy gave it to us. And all these crappy records. Will you look at this
shit’ ” (4)? She tries to explain how they got the furnishings while chatting with
her friends in their apartment. What is behind those strong words?
On the whole, the girl was definitely affected by the strange meeting with
the man. It moved her, because the last words of the story say: “There was more
to it, and she was trying to get it talked out. After a time, she quit trying” (4). She
experienced something that she could not precisely explain and it is going to
remain hidden. Something was left out of the story and we can see whatever we
want in that odd moment of shared emotions.

1
Lehman, W. Daniel. “Symbolic Significance in the Stories of Raymond Carver.” Journal of the
Short Story in English, 46 | Spring 2006. Online since March 1st, 2006. http://jsse.revues.org/493

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 In conclusion, Carver showed in his short story how desperation changes
people. The man that was once happy is now sad and bitter inside. The two young
people were the only excitement in his life in that time. We will never know
surely what was behind the man’s desperation and the girl’s affection. Only the
reader himself can assume what happened between them that one evening.

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Bibliography

Carver, Raymond. “Why Don’t You Dance?” In What We Talk About When We
Talk About Love. New York: Knopf, 1981.

Lehman, W. Daniel. “Symbolic Significance in the Stories of Raymond Carver”

Journal of the Short Story in English, 46 | Spring 2006. Online since March 1st,
2006. http://jsse.revues.org/493