Why Don't You Dance? Analysis

Just like with the characters, the setting doesn't exactly get a ton of fleshing out; details are few and far between. We don't know for sure where in the English-speaking world the story takes pla...

The narrator in this story is pretty removed from the action, offering very little commentary on the characters and dialogue that s/he presents us. In fact, the vast majority of the story consists...

The genre here is kind of hard to pin down, but family drama seems closest since the whole premise of this quirky yard sale is that the protagonist has lost his wife somehow. We don't know how or w...

Okay, so we're not totally sure what's going on with the dynamics between the younger couple and the older man, but it definitely strikes us as weird (or quirky) and vaguely depressing. The older m...

It's a short story, so we weren't exactly expecting Proust-style sentences that go on for entire chapters (since, you know, the story doesn't have chapters), but this tale goes really far in the ot...

The title—"Why Don't You Dance?"—refers to arguably the creepiest moment in the story, when the older man gets super interested in watching the young couple dance to the music he plays on his a...

The story's ending requires just as much reading between the lines as the rest of the tale does. We learn that the young girl is still feeling pretty uneasy and weird about her encounter with the o...

You probably aren't going to have any trouble with the language here since Carver doesn't put in too many (or really any) million-dollar words. That said, it's definitely hard to pin down what's ha...

The Lights Are On—Outside—And No One Is HomeThe story opens with a man drinking whiskey and staring out at a bunch of furniture that he's apparently left on his lawn. It seems that he has previ...

Like his main character in this story, Raymond Carver struggled with alcoholism—but he kicked the habit eventually. (Source)Hard though it may be to imagine even one, "Why Don't You Dance?" actua...

Nothing truly dirty happens in the story. The raunchiest it gets is when the young girl suggests that she and the young boy could have sex on the bed on the lawn in front of all he neighbors. But e...