Cathedral by Raymond Carver

Introduction

Raymond Carver's decision to dedicate Cathedral to the memory of John Gardner, from whom Carver took a writing course in the fall of 1958, may seem rather odd to many readers. Gardner's expansive stories and novels sprawl across page after page as the author seeks to affirm the eternal verities of moral fiction. Carver's fiction is written in an entirely different mode: concise, elliptical, and tightly controlled, suggestive rather than (as with Gardner) exhaustive. This style, which several reviewers have inaccurately termed minimalist, is as clipped as Ernest Hemingway's and as incisive and emotionally detached as Joan Didion's. Nevertheless, Carver and Gardner do resemble each other in one most important way: their shared commitment to “values and craft,” as Carver phrases it in his foreword to Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist (1982).

Characters

Before discussing this advance, it is necessary to establish the chief object of Carver's concern, the lives of his characters. The title story of Carver's 1983 volume, Cathedral, illustrates the shift in perspective that marks that collection. While the characters in Carver's earlier work are trapped in desolate (though not necessarily tragic) lives and lack the comprehension or ability to communicate that might help them escape, the stories in Cathedral feature a more hopeful, affirmative tone and more expansive narration. In fact, Carver noted in an interview that he realized before writing these stories that he had gone as far in the direction of minimalist as he could, “cutting everything down to the marrow, not just to the bone.” One of the most acclaimed stories in the collection (which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award), “Cathedral” explores through its sometimes comically insensitive narrator the possibility that even the most ordinary sensibility can achieve deeper insight.

The narrator's irritation at having to entertain his wife's old friend may be attributed not only to his jealousy—for his wife has corresponded with Robert for years and shared many details of her life with him—but to his discomfort with blindness itself. He admits that his idea of blind people comes from the movies, where they always move slowly and silently. In a passage that reveals Carver's talent for black humor, the narrator muses on Robert's dead wife-how she was never seen by the man she loved and must never have received a compliment about her looks from him, “and she on an express to the grave” (Meyer, p. 182). The narrator is surprised to learn that Robert not only behaves much like anyone else but also has a vibrant personality. Nevertheless, he treats his houseguest in a vaguely mocking, abrasive manner.

The blind man, Robert, is portrayed entirely through the narrator's rather jaded perspective, and the reader never receives many details about his personality or life. We do know that he has a job in social services and that he has recently lost his wife, to whom he was happily married. Despite the narrator's antagonism and insensitivity, Robert makes a positive impression through his cheerfully ...