Response to "The Cathedral" by Raymond Carver
I fear this essay may come off a bit choppy due to the fact that while reading “The Cathedral” by Raymond Carver I had a lot of different questions and thoughts running through my head. The first thing I noticed was that the narrator never really uses names and that confused me. Making the story difficult to navigate and raising the question, why leave character names a mystery until later? What purpose does it serve? We never learn the names of the narrator, the wife or the officer, most of the time we discover names through dialogue. Through the conversation with the wife and the narrator we learn that the blind man is named Robert while his late wife was Beulah. I began to wonder if all of Carver’s writings are this way or if this is an experimental piece of writing. Perhaps Carver felt that the names simply weren’t needed to advance the plot.
The narrator’s bitterness towards everyone strikes me as well. I find myself wondering where all of this jealousy comes from. We see it several times throughout the story. “Her officer—why should he have a name? he was the childhood sweetheart, and what more does he want?—came home from somewhere, found her, and called the ambulance.” His thoughts on the officer for example, what more does he want, sound bitter and jealous almost; jealous of what? His marriage to the woman? The fact that he didn’t have her heart first? Does he feel that the officer wasn’t good enough for her? Is he just a generally hateful person? It is much deeper than that, “My wife finally took her eyes off the blind man looked at me. I had the feeling she didn’t like what she saw.” It appears to stem from a place of insecurity in himself and how others see him.
Our narrator doesn’t want to meet the blind man at first, maybe due to the fact that he doesn’t know how to act around him. We see him struggle with what to talk about. He thinks of asking him what side of the train he sat on because the views are different but then doesn’t talk about the
The narrator’s bitterness towards everyone strikes me as well. I find myself wondering where all of this jealousy comes from. We see it several times throughout the story. “Her officer—why should he have a name? he was the childhood sweetheart, and what more does he want?—came home from somewhere, found her, and called the ambulance.” His thoughts on the officer for example, what more does he want, sound bitter and jealous almost; jealous of what? His marriage to the woman? The fact that he didn’t have her heart first? Does he feel that the officer wasn’t good enough for her? Is he just a generally hateful person? It is much deeper than that, “My wife finally took her eyes off the blind man looked at me. I had the feeling she didn’t like what she saw.” It appears to stem from a place of insecurity in himself and how others see him.
Our narrator doesn’t want to meet the blind man at first, maybe due to the fact that he doesn’t know how to act around him. We see him struggle with what to talk about. He thinks of asking him what side of the train he sat on because the views are different but then doesn’t talk about the