Raymond Carver's short story "Cathedral" explores a number of different social and psychological issues including stereotyping and prejudice. hen the blind male friend of the narrator's wife enters their home, issues related to self-esteem, sexuality, and racism also arise. The blind man, Robert, helps the narrator to "see," serving a symbolic function of enlightenment. Cannabis provides the means by which the two men bond on an emotional and intellectual level, as they draw the cathedral together. Moreover, the difference between traditional organized religion and secular spirituality is explored. "Cathedral" reveals the historical and social context of Raymond Carver's writing.
The most apparent theme in "Cathedral," because it weaves its way throughout the short story, is the changing nature of gender roles. hen the blind man comes to "spend the night" with the narrator and his wife, it is immediately apparent that the narrator feels threatened by a man who happens to….

Ethos is emphasized by presenting Aylmer as a successful scientist who abandoned his career in order to stay with his wife. Pathos emerges at the time when Aylmer is unable to sleep at night thinking that his wife is almost perfect and that he could actually make her perfect by putting his experience to use. Logos takes place when Aylmer performs a series of successful tests and actually goes as far as to demonstrate the potion's success by using it to resurrect a plant.

The central character is blinded by his exaggerated self-appreciation and he fails to observe the risks that he puts his wife to as a result. His obsession with perfection is responsible for making him unable to distinguish between right and wrong.

3. Langston Hughes attempts to speak directly to his readers in "Theme for English B." He is well-acquainted with the fact that society has a tendency to….

Robert lost his wife, he is blind, and he is forced to interact with a person that the narrator believes he feels attracted to. All of these problems seem to be unimportant for the man and this influences the narrator in acknowledging his personal misery. The narrator accepts that he is doomed to being miserable because he is unable to appreciate life and the privileges that nature provided him with (Saltzman 154).
The narrator changes his thinking several times in the evening when Robert comes to visit. He initially believes that Robert is a typical blind man that one can see in motion pictures, he later comes to be frustrated with the man's open nature, and he eventually ends up acknowledging that this is an impressive person. The narrator's "experience with Robert, and attempting to experience the world from Robert's perspective, opens up a whole new way of looking at….

Carver, "Cathedral"
Despite its prominent placement in the title of the story, the cathedral in Raymond Carver's short story "Cathedral" takes quite a while to make its appearance. The story instead is about a marriage -- a husband and wife have a guest to dinner. Carver's story is narrated in the first person, from the perspective of the husband, so to some extent the symbolism of the story is constructed with a sort of irony: the narrator himself is not explicitly aware of the symbolism, nor does he comment upon it directly. As a result, the relationship of the central symbol of the story is more or less oblique: its significance is signposted by the story's title, but is otherwise withheld from the reader for what seems a very long time until it makes its appearance. However, I hope that, with some close reading of the story as a whole, the….

Raymond Carver
hen one is seeking a bright, cheerily optimistic view of the world one does not automatically turn to the works of Raymond Carver. The short story writer - whom many critics cite as being the greatest master of that form since Ernest Hemingway - filled his pages with anger and discontent, despair and loss, desperation and the demons of addiction. The overall tone of his work is certainly dark. But his writing is not universally so, a fact that tends to be overlooked in the overall tone of this oeuvre. But while it would of course be dishonest (and a disservice to the tone of his writings) to call Carver an optimist, it would also be a disservice to him not to consider the happier, gentler and sweeter moments that intercede into his work. This paper examines those moments of brightness, those moments of lightness, in his work when….

The beginning of the end being her attempted suicide, due to the fact that she felt disconnected from him, her first husband, and the world, as he was in the military and they had constantly moved away from human connections she had made. (Carver NP) Her second marriage, to the insular narrator, going to bed at different times, and he sitting up watching late night television in his insular world, where he liked the old sofa, but she insisted on buying a new one is clearly headed down the same path. (Carver NP) Robert's inclusion of the narrator in the epiphany which had initially kept the connection of his wife and Robert over so many years strong served a restorative role, that the reader then hopes the narrator will allow to pervade his and his wife's life together and save them from losing the dream of their love and….

Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938. Carver began his career as a writer as a poet but is more well-known for his prowess in the art of short stories, for which he is widely regarded as the preeminent storyteller of his time. Carver himself is often quoted as saying: "I began as a poet, my first publication was a poem. So I suppose on my tombstone I'd be very pleased if they put 'Poet and short- story writer -- and occasional essayist' in that order." (The orzoi Reader Web site)
Carver studied at Humboldt State University and the University of Iowa while working at various low paying jobs. He married early at the age of 19 and though he stayed married for twenty years, Carver himself said that they knocked around from town to town and job to job: "We were always looking for something better. We worked….

Raymond Carver is a writer who is known for a distinct style and also for distinct themes. The style is what is usually refers to as 'minimalist.' The themes common to his stories include the basics of life and people's struggles. hat is most significant about his subjects is that they are not significant. Rather than focus on anything obviously meaningful, Carver focuses on the realities of the average life, not dressing up the details, but instead focusing on the gritty details that make it real. The stories also tend to focus on issues like loss and violence and drunkenness and rarely provide a happy ending. Each of these distinctive features of Carver's stories can be traced to his own life, with the themes and styles representing Carver's own experiences and his observations of people around him. In this way, Carver's stories are largely autobiographical.
Before considering how Carver's life impacted….

Carver
Raymond Carver's greater maturity of symbolism and theme in "A Small, Good Thing," as opposed to "The Bath"

Both the short stories "The Bath" by Raymond Carver and "A Small, Good Thing," are tales about sudden, tragic and meaningless death. However, while superficially the two stories may revolve around similar themes and plot devices, the longer, latter tale of "A Small, Good, Thing," is ultimately the more thematically redemptive of the two and the more mature expression of a holistic philosophy about life and healing than is the more sparse and harsher "The Bath."

The similarities between the two tales on their surface in terms of literal meaning and plot seem obvious. Beyond the concrete events that the tales tell as they unfold, both stories concern the apparently arbitrary methods by which individuals are taken away from those who care for them. A child can die right before his birthday, despite the….

Raymond Carver
Teenage sexual frustration and repressed anger pervade Raymond Carver's short story "Nobody Said Anything." Although the bulk of the tale covers the narrator's playing hooky from school, the fishing expedition serves mainly as a dramatic and symbolic backdrop for his parents' marital problems. The story begins and ends with tense moments at home, during which mother and father fight furiously while neglecting their two children. The parents do not take their anger out on the kids through overt violence, but they nevertheless emotionally neglect their children, saying nothing to address their feelings. The adolescent narrator struggles to impress his parents, especially his father, by catching a monstrous fish. However, his quest for attention is thwarted and only results in his getting scolded. The fish anecdote serves as a means to indirectly address the narrator's pain; it is a convenient metaphor for divorce, and the disgusting imagery of the dead….

Fathers Life, by Raymond Carver [...] meaning of the essay as it relates to fathers and sons. The relationship between fathers and their sons is difficult, as this essay captures effectively while still managing to be poignant and meaningful. It is clear Carver loved his father, and wanted to share him with the world, and he does it eloquently in this essay that is as much about him as it is about his father.
My Father's Life

Raymond Carver writes about his father's live in this moving essay, and he shows how different life can be for succeeding generations. Clearly, Carver is making his living doing something he loves, but he makes it clear his father was never that lucky. He writes, "I don't think he dreamed much. I believe he was simply looking for steady work at decent pay. Steady work was meaningful work" (Carver). Carver writes with love and….

Serious Talk by Raymond Carver -- or, as Carver might have entitled this essay: "Although not much talking takes place, the story's theme certainly is serious."
From the beginning, Raymond Carver's short story, entitled, "A Serious Talk," engages in a play of inflated and deflated expectations from the reader's and the main characters' perspectives. There is a constant ironic tension between what the reader thinks will happen, and what is delivered by the tone and by the evolving plot of the story. The characters also have their expectations raised that something will happen to break the unhappy monotony of their lives, expectations that are quickly dashed. Irony may be defined "as a difference between the way something appears and what is actually true." Irony is created in the story "A Serious Talk" by the raising of the expectations of both the characters and the reader, followed by a subsequent deflation, by….

realistic? Since a short story is a work of fiction, a product of the imagination, how does an author create the illusion that what is transpiring in the narrative seems 'realistic' to the reader? Why do some works of fiction seem more realistic than other works of fiction? The short story "A Small Good Thing" by Raymond Carver seems like a realistic work of fiction and thus is an excellent way to answer these questions. Carver's story tells the tale of a young boy who is hit by a car near the day of his birthday. It relates the effects this tragedy has upon the boy's parents. Through the use of extremely mundane but specific details, simple and action-oriented characterization of the major protagonists, and very simple and spare prose, Carver creates a sense of a realistic story, even though the end of the tale has a slightly surrealistic….

Most apparent of these symbols is the 'turning of the doorknob,' which signifies the impending death of the Mailman, being a cancer patient. Another symbol used in the poem is the Mailman himself, who embody the individual who have been the model of the modern, worldly society, but in the end succumbed to non- existence as he realized the meaninglessness of his life. Third symbol used in the poem is cancer itself, meant to function as the 'cancer of life,' mirroring people's lives, which remained meaningless and unfulfilled.
The speaker also utilized the continuous narrative as a technique to reflect the Mailman's attempt to give meaning to his life, identifying which among his streams of thought could give him an idea or the answer as to whether he lived a meaningful life or had a meaningful existence or not.

The poem also adopts a straightforward tone, illustrating the ordinariness and simplicity….

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This essay is well-written and well-constructed. The writer refers to the primary source material liberally and provides in-text citations as well as a bibliography. However, the writer could use active voice more often. For example, the sentence "The use of different point-of-view for the narration of the story has great influence on how the elements of characterization and setting are presented" could be rewritten and presented in active voice: "...great influence on how the authors present elements of characterization and setting." The sentence that follows is also slightly clumsy and would be improved through using more parallel verb forms. It reads: "The first person narrative can use more direct characterization to establish the people in the story while the objective point-of-view relies on indirect interpretation." It could be changed to read: "The first person narrative uses direct characterization to establish the people in the story, while the objective point-of-view relies….

I. Introduction
A. Explanation of the significance of "The Cathedral" as a short story by Raymond Carver
B. Brief overview of the main themes and characters in the story

II. Summary of "The Cathedral"
A. Description of the protagonist, the narrator, and his interactions with Robert, the blind man
B. Analysis of the narrator's initial prejudice and ignorance towards Robert
C. Discussion of the transformative experience the narrator has while drawing with Robert

III. Analysis of Themes
A. Theme of prejudice and ignorance
1. Examination of the narrator's initial misconceptions about blindness and his personal growth
B. Theme of communication and understanding
....