Raymond Carver: A Critical Consideration of Diction Raymond Carver utilizes many different literary devices to manipulate his short stories. Out of all the possible literary tools, I feel that his word choice is the most important in creating a “hook” that captures a reader. He tends to take a seemingly unimportant, commonplace event and turn it into an enthrallingly interesting moment. There is a direct correlation between this diction and how these ordinary events become …showed first 75 words of 1071 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1071 total…salesman closes the door, he closes that chapter of the narrator’s life. Again, it is the diction that brings this interpretation forward. In Carver’s stories, there are many things that lend to the meanings each story may have. Things like character development, dialogue, setting, and themes are many of them. But without the proper words to make these descriptions jump off the page, it would not be possible for these things to exist.