Carver Cathedral Carver\'s Cathedral According

Carver Cathedral

Carver's Cathedral

According to critics Larry McCaffrey and Sinda Gregory, symbolism takes on mundane forms in the fiction of Raymond Carver, such that "things are more than what they appear, for often commonplace objects…cigarettes, a bottle of beer or whiskey -- become in Carver's hands…powerful, emotionally charged signifiers in and of themselves" (62). In Carver's short story "The Cathedral," cigarettes and liquor both take on such significance, but more telling still is the smoke that the former produces. Smoke has many properties that are important in this story, from the shared nature of its literal inspiration and aspiration to the fact that it obscures the vision, and rather than being a sign of destruction as it often is in this story smoke is something that serves to draw two characters together, and to create a new understanding and sense of peace. This unusual twist for what is a fairly common cultural symbol is one of the minute features that makes this story so compelling.

In "The Cathedral," the narrator is wary about meeting his wife's decade-old friend Robert, a blind man she has been corresponding with via audiotapes and that at times seems a rival for the husband's affections. It is clear that the husband, formerly a military officer (though he narrates his story partially in the third person and whether or not he actually is this officer is strangely ambiguous), has some problems forming emotional connections with his wife and with anyone else, and he sees the coming of this blind man as an intrusion into his closed world. Shortly after Robert arrives and once they are a few drinks in, the narrator remarks that he "remembered having read somewhere that the blind didn't smoke because, as speculation had it, they couldn't see the smoke they exhaled." Robert does smoke, however, despite not being able to see his smoke, and this is the first instance of a barrier between the narrator and Robert being broken down -- a specific belief of the narrator's about blind men is here shattered, and a common ground is found. The fact that smoke obscures vision even for the sighted is of course important; the cigarettes being smoked not only make Robert more like the unnamed narrator, but they also make the narrator more like the bind Robert by reducing this narrator's vision, though not in an extreme way.