Perspectives

Literary period

The short story “Jerry and Molly and Sam” by Raymond Carver was published in 1976, in the short story collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?.

Raymond Carver is considered a representative of the literary movement known as dirty realism, which is a subgenre of realism. Dirty realism was used mainly by North American writers and focused on rough aspects of everyday life, using a simple and sometimes informal type of language. Characters typically found in dirty realism stories are generally ordinary, and are often not well-off financially, which sometimes leads to conflict.

In the short story “Jerry and Molly and Sam”, we notice that the main character is, indeed, unremarkable, and one of the issues that set the story in motion is the uncertainty about the ...