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.
The smoke that uncurls between these two characters later in the story is even more effective at bringing them together. The trio of Robert, wife, and narrator turn from alcohol and tobacco to cannabis when the narrator rolls two joints to smoke and engages Robert in his first try of the substance. It is under the influence of this drug, and perhaps of Robert's presence and spirit, that a true transformation takes place both between Robert and the narrator and within the narrator himself. The two go from watching (or listening to) a television show about cathedrals to drawing one together…...

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Works Cited

Carver, Raymond. "The Cathedral. Accessed 18 October 2012.

 http://nbu.bg/webs/amb/american/6/carver/cathedral.htm 

McCaffrey, Larry and Gregory, Sinda. "An Interview with Raymond Carver." Mississippi

Review 14(1/2): 62-82.

Carver's "Cathedral"
An Analysis of Theme and Plot in Carver's "Cathedral"

Raymond Carver states that by the mid-1960s he had tired of reading and writing "long narrative fiction" ("On riting" 46). Shorter fiction, he found, was more immediate. Flannery O'Connor states a similar idea in The Habit of Being: for her, the novel was a literary medium that could bog down all of one's creative powers. Turning to a short story was a way of escape: "My novel is at an impasse. In fact it has been at one for as long as I can remember. Before Christmas I couldn't stand it any longer so I began a short story. It's like escaping from the penitentiary" (O'Connor 127). This mode of thought may help us to understand why Carver turned to composing shorter works of fiction like "Cathedral," a work that acts as a brief glimpse into how one man's physical blindness…...

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Works Cited

Carver, Raymond. "Cathedral." 1983. Web. 25 Sept 2012.

Carver, Raymond. "On Writing." Mississippi Review, vol. 14, no. 1/2 (Winter, 1985), pp.

46-51). Print.

O'Connor, Flannery. The Habit of Being. NY, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979.

Raymond Carver, "Cathedral"
Raymond Carver's short story "Cathedral" is narrated in the first person by the unnamed protagonist, and tells a deceptively simple story: the narrator's wife (also unnamed) has invited her former employer Robert, an older blind man recently widowed, to come for dinner and stay the night. The husband is resistant to the social occasion, but goes through with it -- although his narration makes us privy to his thoughts (which are occasionally marked by a low-level hostility) or else offers wry and laconic descriptions of his own statements and behavior. Eventually after consuming several scotches and some "dope you can reason with," the wife falls asleep on the sofa leaving the protagonist in conversation with the blind Robert, eventually leading to the muted but bittersweet conclusion of the story. Yet Carver carefully employs the first-person perspective of the narrator to demonstrate -- almost beyond his own self-awareness --…...

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…...

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Works Cited

Raymond Carver's Double Life. Literature: Contemporary. www.contemporarylit.about.com

Carver, Raymond. Cathedral. Literature: Arts and Medicine.

Irving, Howe. Stories of Our Loneliness. The New York Times: Books. September 11,

Carver, Raymond. Cathedral. New York. Random House.1984.

As Bub found out, he cannot verbally convey the concept of cathedral to the blind man. He has to show him; he had no actually get down on his knees and speak the blind man's language. The narrator admits that he had to level with Robert: "my life depended on it."
Prior to his epiphany, Bub remained stubbornly prejudiced, believing such silly notions as "The blind didn't smoke because...they couldn't see the smoke they exhaled." The narrator's narrow world prevented him from viewing Robert as a person. Instead, all he saw was a stereotypical blind man. For example, Bub expected Robert to be wearing sunglasses and when he wasn't he was shocked. Similarly, the narrator seems to think that the blind man's beard is somehow out of place simply because Robert cannot see. The narrator's prejudices remain solidly in place until the conversation about the cathedral.

Bub is not a bad…...

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Works Cited

Carver, Raymond. "Cathedral." The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym.

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, relates the story of what happens to the mother, Betty, and the horrible temporary jobs she takes to take care of her family.

One day at a drunken party at the hotel's pool, her husband, Holits, climbs to the roof of one of the units to jump into the water. Betty cries out, "What are you doing?" But he just stands there at the edge. He looks down at the pool, deciding how much he will have to run to get…...

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References

Carver, Raymond. A New Path to the Waterfall. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1989.

Carver, Raymond. Call if You Need Me. New York: Vintage, 2000.

Kibble, Matthew (Ed). "Raymond Carver" from Literature Online biography. London: Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company, 2001.

Scribner's Writing Series. Raymond Carver. Writers A to Z. Section. New York: Thompson Gale.

Cathedral Raymond Carver
In his short story, Cathedral, author Raymond Carver argues that community and connection are an important component of life. The narrator begins the story as an isolated man, with few friends and little connection to the outside world. His insularity is upset by the arrival of his wife's friend, a blind man. Initially highly resistant to the blind man's intrusion into his world, the narrator gradually warms to the man through a meal and describing a television program. However, the narrator is not fully moved out of his insulated world until he and the blind man begin to draw a cathedral together. It is this experience that reinforces the importance of connection and community within Carver's Cathedral.

At the beginning of the story, the narrator is clearly isolated from the rest of the world. He sees the world in a defined, stereotypical way, avoids connections with other people, and…...

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Works Cited

Carver, Raymond. 1989. Cathedral. Random House, Inc.

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 a new level of insight. The narrator is literally and figuratively touched.
Finally, the literary elements converge to create irony. After all, the blind man possesses greater insight into the human condition than a sighted man. The blind man intuitively knows that the television is color instead of black and white -- not because he can see it with his eyes but because of what he senses from being around his hosts. The narrator's prejudices about the world are formed in…...

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Work Cited

Carver, R. (n.d.). "Cathedral." Retrieved online:  http://www.misanthropytoday.com/cathedral-by-raymond-carver-weekend-short-story/

Power in Cathedral and Ethics
People in the position of power have the authority to influence the world around them. ith this power should come responsibility. Those with the power to change the world must stand behind their actions. They have the responsibility to take ownership of their choices and they also have the implicit responsibility of bettering the lives of the people around them. In Carver's "Cathedral" and Pastan's "Ethics" are both short stories which deal with individuals with power and how those people utilize their positions responsibly or shirk their responsibility in favor of personal pleasure.

In Carver's "Cathedral," the story begins with the narrator informing the reader that he is uncomfortable with his impending visitor because the man is blind. This narrator is seemingly dismissive of everything; not only the blind man or his relationship with the man's wife, but dismissive of his wife's first marriage, of her poetry…...

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Works Cited:

Carver. "Cathedral." Print.

Pastan. "Ethics." Print.

Cathedral, a story by Raymond Carver, there are three main characters: a husband, a wife, and the wife's blind, male friend. The story is told in the first person, from the point-of-view of the husband, and the mood and tone of the story is austere and tense.
At the beginning of the story, the character of the husband is hostile, and angry that the wife's blind friend is coming to visit. The husbands' anger seems out of proportion, and serves as an interesting foil to the wonder and kindness he exhibits at the end of the story. The husband has a strong prejudice against the blind. hen the two men are alone, the blind man touches the hand of the husband. At the touch, the husband changes, and he is able to empathise with the blind man. In short, the character of the husband grows, and becomes kinder and more…...

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Works Cited

Carver, R. The Cathedral. In: Cathedral: Stories. New York: Knopf, 1981.

Cathedral
Character Analysis: Cathedral Narrator

The objective of this study is to present an argument that the narrator in 'Cathedral' is a complex and sympathetic character and to consider the extent to which he seems unaware with his own limitations despite being incapable of articulating that unhappiness. The narrator in the work of Raymond Carver entitled "Cathedral" is a complex and sympathetic character who is unaware of his own limitations and essentially unhappy even though he is incapable of articulating that unhappiness and learns from a blind man that unless one is aware of their limitations that those limitations cease to exist. The work 'Cathedral' is about a visit paid by a blind man to his friend, the wife of the narrator, following the death of the blind man's wife. While the wife greatly anticipates the visit of the blind man, the husband and narrator of 'Cathedral' has a great deal of…...

Shannon
Raymond Carver's "Cathedral"

This is a short story that is told majorly from the eyes of a character referred to here as 'Bub' who is a husband to a woman who had a blind friend, Robert who comes to visit and the visit turns out to be a self search time for Bub and great revelation period for him.

The story employs strong use of symbolism as well as motifs to present the themes and the change of state of the mind of Bub as well as the mental disposition of Bub's wife. There is also exposition of the significance of some styles to the development of themes as well as the flow of the story.

The predominating theme of the story is self-reflection/search and sight verses vision. It is apparent that even though the Bub lives with the wife, he does not understand her needs and emotional state well. Robert, who is…...

"I can hear you...I'm alright," he says, but at the end of the story he resumes his drinking again (Carver, 1989, p.274).
The significance of physicality in both stories is noteworthy, as it seems to reflect a distrust of language, rather than an embrace of language, as the characters communicate primarily though touching. Carver's prose has often been called minimalistic, a charge that he resisted. Yet Inez and Lloyd do not connect when they go for marital counseling, they do connect, if only briefly, when Inez must clean Lloyd's ears. The only time Lloyd can really hear is when his wife tries to reach him through physical rather than verbal gestures. The husband of "Cathedral" rages against blindness, but enters the blind man's world through the medium of touch, even after he has tried to exclude the blind man by turning on the TV.

hat is particularly important for an analysis…...

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Works Cited

Carver, Raymond. "Cathedral." From Where I'm Calling From. New York: Vintage,

Carver, Raymond. "Careful." From Where I'm Calling From. New York: Vintage, 1989.

Champion, Laurie. "What's to Say': Silence in Raymond Carver." Studies in Short Fiction. Spring 1997. New York: Thompson & Gale pp.1-6

Trussler, Michael. "The narrowed voice: minimalism and Raymond Carver." Studies in Short Fiction. Winter 1994. New York: Thompson & Gale, p1-12

The narrator in "Reunion" has an optimistic understanding of life and feels that it would be impossible for him and his father not to have a good time going out. Even with the fact that he is aware of his father's drinking problem, he feels that their relationship is stronger than his father's need for alcohol and that they are probable to overcome their issues as a result of communicating. Alcohol is actually one of the reasons for which Charlie opens his eyes and sees the horrible truth regarding his father. It is then when he realizes that his father cannot get rid of his alcohol problem and that it would be best for him to avoid ever seeing him again.

Charlie virtually experiences rebirth as he sees his father drinking heavily and behaving aggressively. He realizes that this is who his father is and that this person is never going…...

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Works cited:

Carver, Raymond, "The Cathedral"

Cheever, John, "Reunion"

Winter, Michael, "Archibald the Arctic"

"
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…...