The tip of the iceberg. (Daniel Riquelme)

While seeing a picture of an iceberg we are amaze of the fact that a huge piece of ice is floating on the sea’s surface. But the reality is that we don’t know what is below the surface, and certainly it is bigger and more complex than what we can see.

In this sense, the short stories by Raymond Carver are written based on this phenomenon. This style was originally settled by Ernest Hemingway who focused his writing on the superficial aspects of the story narrated. Both Hemingway and Carver meant the reader to find out what were the main and crucial themes treated in the story that were not written explicitly. So the idea is that the background of the story is omitted while the narration tells in a superficial way what’s happening at that moment, this led to a minimalistic style.

Look at this quotation of Carver’s short story Why don’t you dance?

"Those people over there, they're watching," she said.

"It's okay," the man said. "It's my place," he said.

"Let them watch," the girl said.

"That's right," the man said. "They thought they'd seen everything over here”

The man finished the dialogue with this phrase “They thought they’d seen everything over here”. In the story this make sense in the way that people is always judging from what they see, probably they just saw a scene, a picture of that moment and think that they can have a say on other’s life. On the other hand, we as readers are the observers; we are reading and creating an image of what is happening in the story. Nevertheless, the story was written in a way that we think that it is superficial and even senseless. But, there’s a lot more in these stories. Dreams, tragedies, love, opportunities, and misfortune bias the characters’ behavior. As a result, we have to go beyond the casual dialogue, the descriptions and the hard facts that are presented trying to answer why did that happened and make connections between the lexis used, the facts and the mood of the characters and with those clues try to crack the meaning, the real theme, the background of the story.

Now try to think on how many things surrounding us are like this tip of the iceberg, and how many times we avoid looking beneath the surface to see what is really happening. It’s not only about literature; it’s our life, and the things we lost when we support them in facts. There’s a lot more waiting for you.  

Daniel Riquelme.