Review of "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver 8/03/13

"Cathedral"

*SPOILERS* Raymond Carver's simple yet profoundly rich story of deep communion and compassion draws the reader in with its carefully crafted characters and ordinary but powerful symbols. Carver's "Cathedral" tells a story of a blind man (Robert) who saves the unnamed narrator ("the husband") from his spiritual indifference and loneliness. The story begins when Robert enters the couple's home as a messiah figure, eager to save the husband from the routines of everyday life. The wife also presents herself as the antagonist who nitpicks her husband's naiveté to the point of disparaging him of his capacity for personal depth. Near the end of the story, while the wife is sleeping, Robert draws the husband in towards greater spiritual awareness by "listening" to him and by asking the husband to draw a cathedral in order so that the husband might see the cathedral with his own ethereality. The story begins to approach its climax as Carver now imagines the husband surmounting his incapacity to express his deep but hidden desire for interpersonal communion, which he projects onto his crude drawing of the French cathedral. Just as the wife awakens to interrupt her husband from his transcendence, the blind man stops her and urges the husband to close his eyes. The story finally ends as Robert fully elevates the husband to a kind of homemade serenity: "'It's really something,' [the husband] said."

Illustration by Sonja Murphy