POP QUIZ! Which sometimes-blogger celebrated her 6th birthday on the same day (August 2nd 1988) that Raymond Carver died?
I think that year my mother made a Muppet Babies cake for me. Or maybe My Little Pony? Anyway, I just realized this fact after doing some research on Carver for a lit class I'm TA-ing for this summer. I thought I'd post up my notes meant for the ENG 336 students to engage in critical discourse of the text (read: mild scholarship, a little dry). JUST 'SCUZ.
Inciting Incident
“Cathedral” is an example of Carver’s ostensibly
simple story featuring characters from Middle America who exhibit the anxieties
with either their work, their love lives, or their identity. The unnamed
narrator in “Cathedral” and his wife anticipate the arrival of the wife’s old
friend with whom she has kept in contact. The narrator is upset about Robert’s
visit, namely because he is blind and he is prejudiced against blind people,
while the wife is excited to have him visit. In the first paragraph, we
establish that the narrator’s distain for blind people indicates an awareness
of how he lacks intimacy, while the wife’s anticipation for his visit indicates
her yearning for intimacy. Right from the start, we learn that there is this
tension between husband and wife, and Robert’s visit is somehow going to
exacerbate or alleviate this
tension.
Rising
Action: Flashbacks
As you read in
this week’s reading in The Art of the Short Story, the plot only takes place in the span of four or
five hours, from suppertime until late at night. However, Carver intersperses
this action with background from what his wife has told him. Starting on the
second paragraph, the narrator tells the history of his wife’s friendship with
the Robert. It’s no secret the narrator harbors a blunt dislike of him and of
blind people in general: “And it bothered me
that he was blind.” Note how
he reveals his obtuse prejudice and disregard for the whole situation. He
drinks constantly and glazes over seemingly important details which are
meaningful to his wife:
“But she was
in love with [her first husband], and he was in love with her, etc.” “So okay.
I’m saying that at the end of the summer she let the blind man run his hands
all over her face, said goodbye to him, married her childhood etc., who was now
a commissioned officer, and she moved away from Seattle.”
We know these
details mean the world to his wife because she writes poems about them—her life
with her first husband, their divorce, the incident with Robert touching her
face—while her husband simply brushes them off with “etc.” Through the
narrator’s telling of his wife’s backstory, we understand his unwillingness to
acknowledge the emotional impact of these details, we see his present nature as
someone who is incapable of intimacy and emotionally detached, which adds
tension and advances the plot of the story.
Rising
Action: Reversals of Preconceptions
When we resume
the plot about four pages into the story (starting with “Now this time the
blind man was coming to sleep in my house”), we know that the narrator’s
negativity is going to be challenged—he is ripe for change. The moment Robert
visits, all of the narrator’s prejudices about blind people are proven wrong.
Robert doesn’t move slowly, he doesn’t use a cane, he doesn’t wear glasses, he
is affable and speaks confidently, and he even sports a beard—which the
narrator’s finds unbelievable, probably because he finds no use in having
facial hair if you can’t see it. Note how Robert consistently strokes his
beard, dispelling another stereotype for the narrator—he sees is as a pointless
thing to have a beard, while Robert is satisfied by touching his beard and even
sniffing it. The narrator sees tangibility as only what one can see, but the
blind man uses his other senses to find tangible meaning.
When the
narrator invites Robert to drink and smoke marijuana and when Robert accepts,
more of the narrator’s stereotypes are broken. During the cathedral documentary
on the television, the narrator’s
need to explain the physical details of the cathedrals to Robert indicates his
growing need to communicate with him. He is unable to properly describe the
cathedrals and admits his spiritual deprivation:
“You’ll have
to forgive me…But I can’t tell you what a cathedral looks like. It just isn’t
in me to do it. I can’t do it any more than I’ve done…The truth is, cathedrals
don’t mean anything special to me. Nothing. Cathedrals. They’re something to
look at on late-night TV. That’s all they are.”
At this point,
the narrator lacks the vitality that Robert, despite his “handicap,” assumes
completely. The narrator is nervous, drinks constantly, smokes marijuana to
mask his insecurities while Robert, on the other hand, is comfortable,
knowledgeable, worldly and, most importantly, he is kind. This leaves the
narrator completely unmoored.
We see this
plot reversal take place after his inability to describe the cathedral and
admits to being devoid of any spiritual meaning. Once he realizes that Robert,
a man he once considered revolting, is humanized and actually a decent person,
the narrator is ready for his revelation moment. The cathedral is the subject of their conversation, but it becomes
much more than that. It serves as a way to reach the narrator and show him to
see things differently.
Crisis
Action as Epiphany
Like the final
reversal and recognition with Gabriel Conroy in “The Dead,” the narrator’s epiphany
comes after all his barriers are broken. The tension between the two men and
the narrator’s wife comes to a head when Robert suggests holding his hand as he
draws a cathedral. When the blind man puts
his hands on the narrator’s, he is showing him that even without sight, he is
capable of finding meaning in his life. Even when Robert tells him to open his
eyes, the narrator doesn’t want to, and his not opening his eyes works as the
external action of his mostly epiphanal crisis action. He has realized that
clear sight is more than a visual experience. There is irony in the blind man
helping the non-blind man “see” for the first time.
Conclusion
While most of Carver’s writing focuses on depressed, morally or
emotionally bankrupt people facing harsh truths and disappointments in their
lives, “Cathedral” seems to exhibit a character that changes for the best and
grows from his own prejudices after his revelation. It is a story of optimism and hope—as the narrator himself
expresses sentimentally, “It’s really something.”
