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 meaning of the story's central symbol will become apparent.
"Cathedral" is about a marriage that is fraught with rather ordinary tension. Part of the central conceit of Carver's story is that, in telling it through the voice of a first-person narrator, the reader is put in the position of having to evaluate the story as it is told, and decide the extent to which the narrator is, in fact, reliable. In other words, it might be easy to miss the full meaning of the story upon a cursory first read, if the reader is merely taking the narrator at his word. The real issue, of course, is that the narrator's denials and asides eventually begin to add up -- after so many claims that his wife's "blind man" is unimportant and that "he was nothing to me" (1), the reader eventually realizes that we should not be trusting the narrator. In reality, the narrator's attitude toward the blind man is one of suppressed jealousy: in some sense, "Cathedral" is quite nearly a story about adultery, except that the adultery has never taken place. Instead, what the blind man and the narrator's wife have shared is...
Raymond Carver's short story "Cathedral" explores a number of different social and psychological issues including stereotyping and prejudice. When 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,
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
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
Raymond Carver When 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.
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
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
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