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, 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. When 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 be a friend of his wife. Friendships between men and women have not always been socially sanctioned, but by the time carver writes "Cathedral," men and women were redesigning their gender roles to suit modern norms. The narrator therefore notes, "she and the blind man had kept in touch. They made tapes and mailed them back and forth. I wasn't enthusiastic about his visit," yet blames his lack of enthusiasm on the man's being blind (section 1). In fact, the narrator is more bothered by the fact that the wife and the blind man "made tapes and mailed them back and forth," thereby sharing an emotional bond that...
The emotional bond between the wife and Robert does not constitute infidelity; but the narrator still feels threatened by the fact that his wife shares something with another man. His wife also had a full life before she met the narrator, showing that women in Carver's time did not define themselves by their roles as wives or mothers. Women had opportunities for self-determination and self-expression that went far beyond their heterosexual relationships or the patriarchal social structure.
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
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
The story "The Bridle," for instance, tells about what could have turned out to be a family tragedy. However, written by Carver it becomes much stronger and more positive. After going bankrupt in agriculture, a family moves with its few belongings packed into a station wagon to a cheap apartment in a hotel somewhere in the Midwest. The narrator, who is the unfriendly and uncaring woman who runs the hotel,
For instance, in the wife's poem, "she talked about what she had felt at the time, about what went through her mind when the blind man touched her nose and lips." The touching of the nose and lips is juxtaposed against the touching of emotions. Finally, the narrator achieves his epiphany via the sense of touch directly at the end of the story when Robert guides his hand towards
Therefore, Johnson weaves clever and poignant paradoxes in the language as well as the overarching themes. The one-eyed man could have died or lost his good eye, as the Nurse points out. He survives unscathed, and sees what his wife forbade him to see. Likewise, Hardie could have faced immanent death in the war but he survives by going AWOL. In both cases, subverting social convention is a key
Good Man is Hard to Find For the purposes of this essay, I chose Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find." "A Good Man is Had to Find" is an apt topic for research such as this, because the ambiguity of the story's position regarding a grandmother ultimately responsible for the death of her entire family leads to a wide variety of possible readings, each with
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