The Bleakness of Lloyd's Life

Lloyd is middle-aged and might be expected to hold a job, but the fact that he is "trying to do something ab off his drinking" (Carver 266) yet is have donuts and champagne for breakfast and at 11:00 a.m. has non changed out of his pajamas suggests that he can non hold down a job and has not done so for some time. The fact that he has been by and through an "assessment" of his marriage with Inez suggests that she threw him out of the house after peradventure y auricles of quarrels and confrontations. The physically circumscribed nature of his rented attic be views bespeaks a descent into the low-rent margins of society.

The laconic presentation of fact and disaster also becomes fodder for narrative irony. When Lloyd is lying on his side waiting for his ear to clear, he "looked at the things in the live from this new perspective. But it wasn't any different from the old office of looking, except that everything was on its side" (Carver 273). What lends irony to that passage is that Lloyd's smudge both forces him and offers him an opportunity to look at his brio from a different point of view. But the old office of looking--as it were through a champagne glass darkly--is pretty much the way he has decided to see life. The very title of the story--" awake"--is an ironic comment on what may be presumed to be the drunken helplessness with which Lloyd

Lloyd's unceasing concentre on the immediate circumstance obscures his ability to focus on the big picture, which can be seen as a portrayal of the Freudian Unconscious of repressed anxieties, or perhaps of Kierkegaard's sickness unto death, described as a "torment of despair" deriving from "the disconsolateness of not being able to get out" (Kierkegaard 341-2). That seems a fair reading of Lloyd's unacknowledged but grimly evident situation; his doings shows him to be paralyzed by his none too carefully examined fear. Thus when Inez leaves he fractional dresses, then immediately undresses himself and reverts to pajamas and a new bottle of champagne. He is hardly careful even with that one source of comfort--half rinsing, i.e., not washing, the oil out of his (only?

) glass before discarding it when it affects the taste, then subsiding in to drink right from the bottle and characterizing the whole point as "[not] that much out of the ordinary" (277). Such behavior serves the purpose of marking the dominant reality of Lloyd's despair and suggesting that really ordinary experience is for him irretrievable.

Kierkegaard, Soren. "Sickness Unto Death." Trans. Walter Lowrie. 1849. A Kierkegaard Anthology. Ed. Robert Bretall. New York: The red-brick Library, 1946.

Nor, by the way, does physically unclogging the ear improve Lloyd's hearing of Inez's concerns--a occurrence that does appear in the text and that amplifies the symbolism of the clogged ear:

"It means just what I said. But you're free to venture as you please. I mean, it's a free country," she said (Carver 269).

has lived his life for such a long time. He is resolving to be "careful" about which way he turns his head in sleep but not about the decorum of his life. A failure to take sufficient care, it is to be presumed, is what has landed him in a species of solitary confinement and what is in danger of depriving him of the care of a life partner. Inez's impersonal and efficient solicitude for unclogging his ear is
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