Cathedral - Raymond Carver About the Author

Cathedral - Raymond Carver

About the author

An American writer Raymond Carver has been writing stories on a smaller emotional scale for few years that creates same effects. Mostly his story settings contain American towns, semi-industrial, which are mostly depressed. However, his characters, working-class loners fighting for speech, from time to time find work as factory hands and waitresses, while his actions in the stories slip across the troubles of every day life and later on through some strange turn of chance or possibly a gloomy cause that in turns breakdown into unsuccessful marriages as well as shattered lives of all related to it. Similarly, mostly his stories leave his readers with shake that is similar to the beginning of a collapse (Literature: Contemporary).

Furthermore, the author of short stories has been typically a writer of strong but at the same time limited effects. He usually shapes and rotates his story material to a high degree of stylization that a reader can observe in his latest collection of stories, Cathedral.

Few critics have suggested that Raymond Carver is moving towards a better and bigger ease of style as well as kindness of feeling along with in most of his work it contains his own presence with the strong hold of his will, which is the strongest force. However, it is not like that he inflict moral or political judgments as in regard to that he is rather modest (O'Connor).

Taking about his newest collection cathedral that include a number of same stories but are however, very skilled within their narrow limits and written with a dry strength, and moving at their height; from the ordinary to the frightening (Arts and Medicine).

Furthermore, his characters however, lack a vocabulary that can let go their feelings, so they must express themselves mainly through vague gesture and wild display.

Mr. Carver portrays insufficient life that does not contain religion or politics or even culture. Also, his stories are without the coverage of class or civilization or society, and finally without the support of strong folkways or mindful rebellion. He presents the life of people who come together in the folds of society who are not awful or unwise but simply lack the capacity to comprehend the nature of their deficiency (Literature: Contemporary).

About Cathedral

The title story Cathedral, is a beautiful piece about a blind man who inquire a friend to guide his hand in drawing a cathedral he has not seen. However, at the end of the story, the two hands moving together where one was showed by means of sight and the other not seemed to be a gesture of society. The story proved a gifted writer who struggled for a larger scope of reference, along with a better touch of shade (Irving, 1983).

Analysis of Cathedral

The story Cathedral is a short account of three people talking, and finally just two in the later stage where none of these characters said anything special or particular in the novel since there were very little happenings and questioned as to how does the story then provides affirmative imagination engagement with the rest of the world (Random House, 1984).

Initially in the beginning of Cathedral, the storyteller's wife plays a tape for her husband of a conversation between her own self and the blind man called Robert. However, the storywriter does not hear how the conversation ends arising the question as to why then this scene has been then included in the story. However, the tale includes quite a few moments in which either the blind man or the narrator comments on the statement which normally people usually and carelessly make of observing the world as similar as knowing the world (O'Connor).

Furthermore, the blind man at the end of the story asks the narrator to open his eyes, but for a some time he keeps them closed and then gave his final comment: "It's really something," that again arousing the question in a reader's mind as to why does he do this? And does his final comment provide a satisfactory ending to the story? However, the ending also leaves his readers ponders about how much more the narrator learned about himself as well as about human communication than the blind man who learned about cathedrals (Irving, 1983).

Plot, theme, settings and characters in the story

The story begins where the husband and wife in a problem marriage get a visit from the wife's close male friend who is sexually not harmful who took a train to get to their house and is blind. The story thus revolves around these two men where climax is the communion between the two men with no role of wife as she is always shown asleep but her few dialogues that slightly unfolded the action was when she asked both of men "What's going on?" (Random House, 1984).

However, when the wife's friend reached from the train station, there was a tense greeting between the two men and broke the ice at dinner and after which the two men touched and had an intense reaction to their contact. Furthermore, Cathedral did not seem to say very much about community in any a larger perspective. It seemed that a blind man and the husband of his friend shared a time of imminent and link when this blind man came to visit. In spite of this experience between two individuals where the husband overcame some of his stereotypes of a blind person or slightest tolerance in order to relate in a different way than stereotypical.

However if the author has presented a large community in this story, it may have been symbolized in a cultural sense where all the three characters over eat and drink alternating these activities for closeness. But what appeared the most in the story was that both husband and wife were not connected satisfactorily with each other where the husband badly wanted to hear both as an expression as well as from her own self of how much he had improved her life since their marriage (Irving, 1983).

Moreover, the husband appeared to be feeling uneasy about just what kind of relationship she had with her blind friend. But in the end he blocked a greater sharing with his wife by not sharing the experience he had with the blind man.

The story thus gave the readers an overall atmosphere gloomy, depressing, and heavy with estrangement. However, the author who had the objective of this story was stereotype of the handicapped that could be overcome left the larger community purpose unfocused as how to harmony the group of people in a unified group to some worthy purposes that might be beneficial to all.

Thus, the theme and story title gave his readers an aggravated and at times antagonistic narrator whose wife has invited a blind friend to spend the night as according to the narrator that his visitor's blindness trouble him and that he was not in a mood in having a blind man in his house that had surprising intensity of his prejudice as his early anger and concern appeared to be way out of proportion to the situation, as if the blind man was threatening him in any way (Tom, 1987).

However, slowly as the evening moves on, the narrator started to feel calm with the blind man, but at the same time challenges him in all sorts of ways. For instance, smoking cigarettes, drinking, and dope, and turning on the TV since being blind that person cannot see. The program was showing a documentary about cathedrals. However, the narrator tried to describe a cathedral in words but was not successful. Thus, the blind man held hand of the narrator as he draws a cathedral on a paper bag and developed experience of a successful communication that changed the narrator (Verley, 1989).

As the blind man said, "Terrific. You're doing fine. Never thought anything like this could happen in your lifetime?" The narrator then closed his eyes and drew blind, said, "So we kept on with it. His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper. It was like nothing in my life up to now" (Tom, 1987).

Few other examples from the story:

Moreover, in Cathedral, hearing and listening were treated in less optimistic terms by the author. However, characters had certainly turned their ears to others, and came away better for it. For example, "I got ears," as the blind man, said affirming, in spite of his handicap that "Learning never ends" (222).

Further on, in Cathedral as walled in by the narrator's own insecurities and prejudices, he was sadly out of touch with not only with his world and with himself, in the form of buffered by drink and pot as well as by the depressing reality, as his wife told him that he had no "friends" and thus, the narrator not unexpectedly lived in a narrow, sheltered world and due to this nature he commented when the blind man came to their house;

blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to," he admitted (209), and later added; "Now this same blind man was coming to sleep in my house" (212) (Verley, 1989).

Thus, his dead hostility was rooted in the blind man's connection in regard to his wife's past and of her independent nature in overall aspects that were threatening to him, which not the least was her former marriage, to which he was always obsessed. At the same time fascinated by and reluctant to hear the blind man's story as he said "my wife filled me in with more details than I cared to know. I made a drink and sat at the kitchen table to listen" (213) he looked for himself indirectly in his wife's relationship with the bind friend (Tom, 1987).

His sense of a secure identity depended upon his bond with a female who was his wife, a bond he seemed to need to see continually reinforced. Although, troubled by his thoughtlessness, his wife did not provide him the reinforcement he longed for. Referring to his wife's conversation with the bind man in the living room, he said, "I waited in vain to hear my name on my wife's sweet lips" (218).

His confused search for his own self involved a repeated measuring as well as protecting of the autocratic status of his name, as he was adamant upon asserting his identity over his wife. Thus, in order to do this he covered her past the way he had covered his own present with insulating self-absorbency.

And in order to sum up her earlier life, he referred to his wife's ex-husband only as her "officer," and says, "Why should he have a name?" (211). However, the blind man himself dealt with pain and sadness as he just lost his wife; "I know about skeletons," he said (223).

In response to the narrator's query regarding the TV since the narrator failed to explain the image he saw on television, Robert listened, and due to failure in understanding, took charge of the situation and said:

Hey, listen to me. Will you do me a favor? I got an idea. Why don't you find us some heavy paper? And a pen. We'll do something. We'll draw one together. Get us a pen and some heavy paper. Go on, bub, get the stuff" (226) (Saltzman, 1988).

Thus, Robert's initiative in the matter of the narrator's failings, as suggested by the author in the story to his readers that that verbal handicaps as well as the larger problems are being the symptoms of incapacitating as blindness. Therefore, Robert's handling of the situation advised finally that handicaps were first and foremost challenges to overcome (Franklin Center, 1988).

Other short stories in the book

Small, Good Thing

Plot, theme, characters

Small, Good Thing, is another short story that appeared in Cathedral. It is a story about a pleasant young couple whose boy was shortly to have a birthday. However, in the time period, the parents ordered a cake from a somewhat morose baker, but before the birthday could be celebrated the boy was injured in an accident and the parents had to watch weakly as their son dies. In the meantime the baker, being some kind of evil spirit of harassment, kept calling the parents to pick up the ordered cake. Thus, here the first part of the story ended abruptly with the baker calling again and again.

Coming to the second part of the story, which was almost three times as long, moves further more than the ending of the first. Here the parents finally visit the baker, rebuking him for his phone calls and informed him about the death of their son. Upon which the baker answered;

Let me say how sorry I am. God knows how sorry. Listen to me. I'm just a baker. I don't claim to be anything else. Maybe once, maybe years ago, I was a different kind of human being.... Forgive me if you can. I'm not an evil man, I don't think. Not evil, like you said.... I don't know how to act anymore" (Saltzman, 1988).

Having some soft corner, he offered the parents some hot rolls and said;

Eating, is a small good thing in a time like this." thus, ending the story:

They swallowed the dark bread. It was like daylight under the fluorescent rays of light. They talked on into the early morning, the high pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving." (Lonnquist).

The second part of the story was less orderly and glittering, but reached more deeply into a human situation and changed the baker from an abstract 'evil force' into a flawed human creature. On the other hand the first version, was a little like second-rank Hemingway, and the second a bit like Sherwood Anderson at his best.

Analysis of the story of human emotions, in which a son gets killed by an accidental car before his birthday and while he fought for his life in the hospital, his mother kept on answering the calls of an angry baker who made a birthday cake and waned it to be picked (Lonnquist).

Now here's a story where a reader might expect the characters to watch the dreadful sunrise and beg to Lord to help them. But since the story is a late Carver story, the dynamics have changed. Thus, rather than of despair, A Small, Good Thing ended when the parents finally meet this angry baker, which goes like this: