"Cathedral" is a short story

by Raymond Carver that was

first published in 1983.
Character List

The Narrator- An unnamed man who

describes his experience with Robert. The
narrator is jealous of the men from his
wife’s past and doesn’t want Robert to visit,
but he eventually connects with him when
they draw a cathedral together. While his
eyes are closed, the narrator has an
epiphany after finishing the drawing in
which he feels like he isn’t anywhere.

Robert The blind man.

Robert visits the narrator and his wife after
his own wife, Beulah, dies. He is a caring,
easy-going man who sets even the narrator
at ease. He encourages the narrator to
draw a cathedral when the narrator is
unable to describe one in words.
The Narrator’s Wife
A nameless woman who invites Robert to
their home. The wife has kept in touch with
Robert since they met ten years ago,
exchanging audiotapes with him and
telling him everything about her life. Before
she married the narrator, she’d been
married to a military officer and was so
unhappy that she tried to kill herself.

Summary Plot Overview

The narrator says that his wife’s blind

friend, whose wife has just died, is going to
spend the night at their house.

He says that he isn’t happy about this

visitor and the man’s blindness unsettles
him. He explains that his wife met the
blind man ten years ago when she worked
for him as a reader to the blind in Seattle.
He says that on the last day of her job
there, the blind man touched her face and
she wrote a poem about the experience.

The narrator then describes his wife’s past.

She married her childhood sweetheart and
became an officer’s wife. Unhappy with her
life, she tried to commit suicide one night
by swallowing pills, but she survived. She
and the blind man kept in touch by
sending audiotapes back and forth to each
other throughout her marriage, and she
told everything to the blind man on tapes.

The narrator says that his wife once asked

him to listen to one of the blind man’s
tapes. They started to listen but were
interrupted before the narrator could hear
anything about himself. The narrator
suggests taking the blind man bowling.

His wife reminds him that the blind man’s

wife, Beulah, just died and says that if he
loves her, he’ll welcome the blind man into
their home. The narrator asks whether
Beulah was “Negro,” and his wife asks him
whether he’s drunk. She then tells him
more about Beulah. Beulah became the
blind man’s reader after the narrator’s wife
stopped working for him, and they
eventually got married. After eight years,
however, Beulah died from cancer.

The narrator thinks how awful it must

have been for Beulah to know that her
husband could never look at her.
He speculates that she could have worn
whatever she wanted.

The narrator’s wife goes to pick up the

blind man at the train station as the
narrator waits at the house. When they
arrive, he watches his wife laughing and
talking with the blind man as she leads
him by the arm to the house. The narrator
is shocked to see that the blind man has a
full beard.
The wife introduces the narrator to the
blind man, whose name is Robert. They all
sit in the living room. The narrator asks
what side of the train he sat on, and Robert
says he sat on the right and that he hadn’t
been on a train for years. The narrator says
his wife looks at him but doesn’t seem to
like what she sees.

The narrator says he’s never known a blind

person. He describes what Robert looks
like and what he’s wearing. Robert doesn’t
wear dark glasses, which the narrator
finds strange. He wishes Robert would
wear them because his eyes look weird and
turn in strange directions. He pours scotch
for all three of them, and they talk about
Robert’s trip.

Robert smokes several cigarettes. The

narrator says he didn’t think blind people
could smoke. They sit down for dinner and
eat ravenously, not speaking, eating so
much that they are dazed. After dinner,
they go back to the living room to drink
more.

The wife and Robert talk about things that

have happened to them in the past ten
years, while the narrator occasionally tries
to join in.

He learns that Robert and Beulah had run

an Amway distributorship and that Robert
is a ham radio operator. When Robert asks
the narrator questions, he makes only
short responses. The narrator then turns
on the television, irritating his wife.

The wife goes upstairs to change clothes

and is gone a long time. The narrator offers
Robert some pot, and they smoke a joint.
The wife joins them when she comes back.
She says she’s going to just sit with them
on the couch with her eyes closed, but she
immediately falls asleep.

The narrator changes the channel and

asks Robert if he wants to go to bed. Robert
says he’ll stay up with the narrator so that
they can talk some more. The narrator
says he likes the company and that he and
his wife never go to bed at the same time.

There is a program about the Middle Ages

on television. Nothing else is on, but
Robert says he likes learning things. When
the TV narrator doesn’t describe what’s
happening, the narrator tries to explain to
Robert what’s going on.

The TV narrator begins talking about

cathedrals, showing different ones in
different countries. The narrator asks
Robert whether he has any idea what a
cathedral looks like. Robert says he doesn’t
and asks the narrator to describe one.

The narrator tries, but he knows he doesn’t

do a very good job. Robert asks him if he’s
religious, and the narrator says he doesn’t
believe in anything. He says he can’t
describe a cathedral because cathedrals
are meaningless for him.

Robert asks the narrator to find a piece of

paper and pen. Then he and the narrator
sit around the coffee table, and Robert tells
the narrator to draw a cathedral.

He puts his hand over the narrator’s hand,

following the movement of the pen. The
narrator draws and draws, getting
wrapped up in what he’s doing. His wife
wakes up and asks what’s going on, and
Robert answers that they’re drawing a
cathedral. The wife doesn’t understand.
Robert tells the narrator to close his eyes
and keep drawing, and the narrator does
so. Soon Robert tells him to open his eyes
and see what he’s drawn, but the narrator
doesn’t open them. He knows he’s in his
own home, but he feels like he’s nowhere.
With his eyes still closed, he says the
drawing is “really something.”

Point of View

Carver uses a first-person narrator to tell

the story of “Cathedral” to emphasize the
bewildering aspects of the transcendent
moment that he relates in the story.

The unnamed narrator is self-absorbed,

concerned only with how the visit from
Robert will affect him and dismissive of
what role Robert may have played in his
wife’s past.
At the same time, the narrator lacks self-
awareness. He pities Robert’s wife, Beulah,
because her husband could never look at
her, never realizing that he doesn’t really
know his own wife despite the fact that he
can see her.

The narrator is not a very skilful storyteller

either, putting his narrative together
crudely, with rough transitions and
defensive interruptions.
For example, when he refers to his wife’s
childhood sweetheart, he breaks in, “Why
should he have a name? He was the
childhood sweetheart, what more does
he want?”

Interruptions such as these reveal the

narrator’s jealous insecurity and suggest
that his relationship with his wife is not as
stable as he makes it out to be.
When Robert arrives, the narrator does his
best to make sense of him. He describes
Robert’s appearance, including his eyes,
and observes Robert’s actions with a kind
of awe: the way Robert smokes his
cigarettes, the way he cuts his meat during
dinner.

Carver’s use of a first-person narrator is

especially effective in these scenes because
it makes Robert seem abnormal, even
alien, because the narrator has no concept
of what a blind man can and cannot do.

Likewise, once Robert becomes more

human for the narrator, he takes shape for
us as well. At the end of the story, when
Robert guides the narrator in drawing the
cathedral with his eyes closed, the narrator
revels in the strangeness of the experience,
and his bewilderment makes this
transcendent moment more poignant.
It is a remarkable moment, but the
narrator’s unsophisticated description of it
makes it a human moment as well.

Optimism and the “Zero Ending”

Summary

Carver finishes “Cathedral” with a “zero

ending,” leaving the narrator with his eyes
closed, imagining the cathedral he has just
drawn with Robert.

A zero ending is an ending that doesn’t

neatly tie up the strands of a story. It may
not even seem like an ending—in some
cases, the writer may seem to have left off
in the middle of a thought or idea.

Instead of tacking on a florid conclusion

that leaves everyone satisfied, Carver often
stops his stories abruptly, at the moment
when his characters are faced with a stark
realization, glimmer of hope, or wall of
confusion.

Ernest Hemingway used the zero ending

in many of his short stories as well. Also
like Hemingway, Carver wrote in a sparse,
masculine style, and this, along with his
favoured method of ending a story, has
prompted many readers to compare the
two writers.

The abrupt ending to the story leaves many

questions unanswered, such as how
exactly the narrator has changed, if his
relationship with his wife will change, or
how his opinion of Robert has changed.

But the answers to these questions are not

the point of the story. “Cathedral” concerns
the change in one man’s understanding of
himself and the world, and Carver ends the
story at exactly the moment when this
change flickers in the narrator’s mind.
The narrator has not become a new person
or achieved any kind of soul-changing
enlightenment. In fact, the narrator’s final
words, “It’s really something,” reveal him to
be the same curt, inarticulate man he’s
always been.

The zero ending, however, adds an

unexpected note of optimism to the story.
Until this moment, the narrator has been
mostly bitter and sarcastic, but he has now
gained a deeper understanding of himself
and his life.

Far from leaving us unsatisfied, Carver’s

zero ending leaves us with our breath held
as the narrator sees a new world start to
crack open.
Ideas, Symbols, Main Ideas
The Cathedral

The cathedral that the narrator draws

with Robert represents true sight, the
ability to see beyond the surface to the true
meaning that lies within.

Before the narrator draws the cathedral,

his world is simple: he can see, and Robert
cannot. But when he attempts to describe
the cathedral that’s shown on television,
he realizes he doesn’t have the words to do
so.

Audiotapes
The audiotapes that Robert and the
narrator’s wife send back and forth to each
other represent the kind of understanding
and empathy that has nothing to do with
sight.
Summary Dirty Realism

The “dirty realism” school of writing

became popular in the 1980s thanks to a
group of writers who began writing about
middle-class characters and the
disappointments, heartbreaks, and harsh
realities of their ordinary lives.

Granta, a highly regarded literary journal,

coined the label dirty realism in 1983 when
it published its eighth issue, which
featured writers from this school.

Granta 8, as the issue became known,

included stories by Angela Carter, Bobbie
Ann Mason, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff,
Raymond Carver, and many others.
Although each of these dirty-realism
writers has a distinctive style, they are
connected by their sparse prose, simple
language, and direct descriptions of
ordinary people and events.
Much of the fiction published in the New
Yorker, where many of these writers were
and are still published, is of the dirty-
realism school, but today the term—as well
as the practice—has somewhat fallen out
of fashion. Many of Carver’s short stories,
including “Cathedral,” are prime examples
of the dirty-realist style.
Dirty realism: Authenticity in the 20th
century

Bill Buford conceived the term “dirty

realism” in 1983. The genre has also been
hailed as Kmart realism.
The phrase is used to describe the work of
a number of American authors writing in
the late twentieth century, including
Raymond Carver, Jayne Anne Phillips,
Richard Bausch and Stanford’s own Tobias
Wolff.

Their literature was defined by its subject

matter: as Buford wrote of the dirty
realists, “They write about the belly-side
of contemporary life — a deserted
husband, an unwed mother, a car thief, a
pickpocket, a drug addict – but they write
about it with a disturbing detachment, at
times verging on comedy.”

Thematic undercurrents of class,

consumerism and degeneration course
through the literature. It provides the
reader with a sense of unromantic
worldliness.
Because the lives of the characters are
unadorned, a certain legitimacy is granted
to the fiction. The struggles of the lower
class are often presented as gruelling but
noble.

Dirty realism turns its eye on the people

that are often dismissed by the literary
elite. It does so matter-of-factly, without
pity.

The absurdity and complexity of life, the

stuff that ossifies the skeleton of fiction, is
apparent even in the most barren fields
and unglamorous gutters.
 Raymond Carver's “Cathedral”
Discussion Questions
Bigger Issues:
1.) Is the narrator a sympathetic
protagonist? Does our opinion of him
change as the story progresses? Does the
narrator develop or change or "grow" over
the course of the evening?
2.) What are the primary emotions
displayed by the narrator throughout, and
how can we understand them in terms of
the life he leads? What are some
adjectives you would use to characterize
him? What role does alcohol play in his
life?
3.) What is the narrator’s attitude toward
his wife? Describe the narrator’s
marriage. What kind of marriage do they
have, and what evidence do you find to
support your conclusion? Is the narrator’s
jealousy of Robert irrational?
4.) What is it about Robert that unsettles
the narrator? What does Robert do to put
the narrator at ease?
5.) How does Robert shatter the narrator’s
preconceived notions of blind people? How
do his appearance and bearing resist
every stereotypical image the narrator has
about blind people, and why is this so
upsetting?
6.) What does the narrator learn from his
encounter with Robert? Is the ending
convincing? Do you believe that there will
be a significant change in his outlook
from this point on?
7.) Contrast the author’s tone and the
narrator’s mood at the opening of the
story with the tone and mood at the end.
How does the change in style reflect the
change that has occurred in the narrator?
8.) How or why is the cathedral an
important image or symbol in the story?
What is the significance of Carver’s choice
of a cathedral as catalyst for the
narrator’s learning experience? What
added dimension does this symbol bring
to our understanding of the story? Can
you tie it to any previous detail?
9.) Describe Carver’s style.

Ideas about Themes:

17.) What does Robert “see” over the
course of the evening?
18.) In what ways is this story about
“seeing” and/or learning?
19.) Discuss “Cathedral” as a story about
“the blind leading the blind.”
20.) In what ways is this story about
communication and connectedness?
(Think about the poems, the tapes, the
ham radio, etc.)
21.) For Carver, salvation lies in human
contact and connection. Comment
critically.