In "Elephant," Raymond Carver explores the tension between freedom and responsibility through the story of a man who is keeping his entire family afloat with a series of loans that seem to be crushing him. But Carver goes beyond just presenting the way these concepts push and pull against one another. Instead, he deftly reveals how they tangle, how the tight grip of responsibility can ironically be the true freedom we seek.
The story begins with the narrator recounting a $500 loan he
makes to his brother. Soon we learn he is making regular support payments to
his mother, an adult daughter, an adult son, and an ex-wife. In the last case,
the payment is legally mandated, but in all the others, he gives the money
voluntarily but also feels forced to do it in a manner best captured in the way
he describes giving the loan to his brother: "to make a long story short,
I sent him the money. I had to. I felt I had to, at any rate—which amounts to
the same thing."
The question of feeling forced to give the money, trapped by
his family's unquenchable needs, is the interesting one. The narrator feels
backed into a corner. His brother never pays him back, his son, daughter, and
mother all keep asking for more money, and the burden definitely weighs on him.
As he puts it, "I was paying out nearly as much money every month as I was
bringing in. You don't have to be a genius, or know anything about economics,
to understand that this state of affairs couldn't keep on." But in some
ways, couldn't we argue that he needs his family just as much as they need
him—that he, in fact, needs to be needed?
When we learn more about his backstory, it becomes clear
that the narrator, like many Carver characters, is a recovering alcoholic. It
would seem he may have a lot to make up for, given at least one horrifying
incident from his past which is revealed in a dream:
“Then, suddenly, I found myself in the company of some other
people—people I didn't know—and the next thing that happened was that I was
kicking the window out of my son's car and threatening his life, as I did once,
a long time ago. He was inside the car as my shoe smashed through the glass.”
So perhaps being trapped in this state of financial bondage
to his family is actually the narrator’s choice, a way for him to make amends
for past sins. He tells us he is a responsible, employed adult now, one who
recognizes his relative good fortune: "I had a job, didn't I? Compared to
her and everyone else in my family, I had it made. Compared to the rest, I
lived on Easy Street." It’s easy then to conclude that now he wants to
redeem himself by playing this heroic role in his family, in which case this is
all a choice, not simply a burden thrust upon him. Or, if you want to further
tangle freedom and responsibility, perhaps even his choice is a form of
compulsion. Given his history of addiction and the way alcoholics sometimes
replace one addiction for another, you could argue that he is addicted to being
needed.
The first dream the narrator has in the story—which is also
a memory—deepens our understanding of this freedom and responsibility conflict.
In it, he is sitting on his father's shoulders, riding him like an elephant. As
he clings to his father's head in fear, his father tells him, “You can let go.
I've got you. You won't fall.” When he lets go, the narrator holds his arms out
to the sides and feels his father's grip protecting him. He is free. He is
safe. He is supported. As Carver describes it, "When he said that, I
became aware of the strong grip of his hands around my ankles. Then I did let
go. I turned loose and held my arms out on either side of me." The
narrator is free to let go because his father is supporting him—much in the
same way he is supporting his family now. This memory—which is clearly central
to the story given its title—lends credence to the reading that the narrator's
financial trap is in part self-made. He wants to be like his father. He wants
to provide that kind of unshakable support. Yet he also still yearns to be
carried the way his father carried him.
At the end of the story, after he entertains a brief fantasy
of fleeing his obligations and running off to Australia, he reconciles himself
to his fate:
"The truth was, I wouldn't be going there any more than
I'd be going to Timbuktu, the moon, or the North Pole. Hell, I didn't want to
go to Australia. But once I understood this, once I understood I wouldn't be
going there—or anywhere else, for that matter—I began to feel better."
And with this acceptance comes a kind of peace. However, as
he walks to work he takes a break in a parking lot, where he physically
revisits that feeling of being on his father's shoulders: "I decided to
put the lunch pail down for a minute. I did that, and then I raised my
arms—raised them up level with my shoulders. I was standing there like that,
like a goof."
‘Goof’ or not, the pose and the scene that follows embodies
the complex, ironic relationship Carver has established between freedom and
responsibility here. It is at once a celebration of the narrator’s freedom in
accepting his burden and a fantasy of escape—of being carried and protected
without any burdens of his own. Let's consider for a moment what would really
happen if the narrator did flee his burdens by running off to Australia. What
would be likely to happen to a recovering alcoholic with no constraints on his
behavior keeping him on a straight and narrow? He would lose control of his
life, take another drink, fall off the wagon. Carver even hints at this when
the narrator reveals what truly frightened him most in that violent dream: "In
the second dream, somebody had offered me some whiskey, and I drank it.
Drinking that whiskey was the thing that scared me. That was the worst thing
that could have happened. That was rock bottom."
Seen this way, we can truly understand that his
responsibilities actually give him the freedom and security that his father's
grip once did. Without the grip of responsibility, he would likely descend into
the illusory freedom of taking a drink, which is itself a form of compulsion,
control, and burden. So, ironically, the grip is the responsibility that frees
him to sit safely with his arms wide. The burden is the safety and the freedom.
As a provider, the narrator can be seen as the elephant, but he is also the
rider of the elephant, somehow protected and empowered by the obligation to provide
for his family.
Then we have that final scene. The narrator's friend George
sees him standing with his arms out in the parking lot, wonders what he's
doing, and then picks him up in a car he recently got souped up but hasn't paid
for yet. The story ends with the two of them racing in the car, flooring it,
dangerously joyriding, and enjoying this fleeting moment of freedom: “He had it
floored, and we were going flat out. We streaked down that road in his big
unpaid-for car.”
This closing image further complicates the notions of
freedom and responsibility. The narrator in this moment is free—free from the
looming debt of the car, free from responsibility for its reckless speed—and
yet he is not in control, not at the wheel, and therefore in more danger. It's
thrilling, but it’s hollow and unsustainable at best and even a kind of trap.
And we know he has chosen to go back to carrying the burden because that
position ironically gives him the most freedom and safety.
In this way, Carver has crafted "Elephant" into a
complex meditation on how the responsibilities that anchor us also somehow make
us free, and how the fantasy of freedom can sometimes be a cage.
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