Analysis Of Raymond Carver Cathedral

Compared to the extravagant and enigmatic writing style that a lot of authors prefer, Carver chooses to employ a minimalist style in “Everything Stuck to Him”, which means his sentences are devoid of elaborate details, explanations,

In the beginning the narrator is un-named, we read the story as thoughts within his mind. His actions gives-off a sense of jealousy. He’s bothered by the former relationship the blind-man and his wife has had in the past. He is blunt and honest with (us) in telling how he feels about the situation. “I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me.” “A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to.” The narrator gives us the introduction to the life event. He tells us about his wife and how she met the blind-man. In short, she formally worked for him, reading him things when she lived in Seattle for a summer. The narrator mentioned when the blind-man touched around his wife face and her current marriage with her childhood sweetheart. Her husband at the time was in the military –industry, which caused her to have to move a lot. She and the blind-man kept in touch by sending voice recorded

Moreover, Carver uses first person point of view to describe the narrator’s life and the meaning of the cathedral to him. Through the first person point of view given to the narrator and one of the main characters of the story, Carver is able to portray a narrator who is jealous and insecure of himself. The narrator’s

I enjoyed reading “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver. The story is realistic, relatable, and meaningful. The main protagonist, Bub, is arrogant and superficial. Because of Robert’s intimate relationship with his wife, he does not like the blind man. To cover up the fact that he is jealous, he states that he never had a blind man in his house before and that Robert does not have the characteristics he thought blind people have. Robert does not wear glasses, has a beard and etc. On page 90 he says, “I always thought dark glasses were a must for the blind.” This shows that even before he met Bub, he already had some preconceived picture of Bub that hinders him from really getting to know the real Bub. However, towards the end of the story he seems

Carver uses foreshadowing as a prominent element in this story. There are many examples of foreshadowing throughout the story. The first time the reader gets to see obvious foreshadowing is when the woman picks up the picture of the baby off the bed where the man is packing his belongings. “Then she noticed the baby’s picture on the bed and picked it up. He looked at her and she wiped her eyes and stared at him before turning and going back to the living room” (277). This small detail foreshadows that physical altercation that the couple will go through with the baby. The last big foreshadow that the reader gets is when the couple knocks over the flower pot. “The baby was red-faced and screaming. In the scuffle they knocked own a flowerpot that hung behind the stove” (277). This is very brief and only mentioned in this sentence. But this is the foreshadowing of the relationship that is broken, or even worse the baby being broken along with the relationship. While there are details at the beginning on the story, there are smaller things that can easily be looked over but are very important. The characters in this story, since it is minimalist fiction, are not ever given names. The characters are always just referred to as; the man, the woman, and the baby. The audience never finds out why the couple is breaking

Carver lived most of his life in a world which could not provide the luxury of

Carver portrays the personality of the narrator in "Cathedral" in his use of conversational and colloquial tone. Carver’s syntactic maneuvers deliver a tone that is mocking, unpleasant and even vitriolic. He hyphenates the narrator’s interjections to convey a sarcastic quality of the narrator. For example: as the narrator is describing the sensitive situation of Beulah’s death, he does so with a taste of wickedness: "After they had been inseparable for eight years--my wife 's word, inseparable--Beulah’s health went into rapid decline" (Norton 30). The hyphenation permits the narrator to present his hostility and mockery into any part of the story; thus, the narrator feels that his opinions and asides are more important than the plot. Throughout the story, he displays a dislike for many seemingly

Carver’s use of third person objective affects the story by helping his writing technique of extreme simplicity. Because we can’t see into any of the characters minds, less details are presented, leaving the story more plain. “‘I couldn’t wait’ he said. That night they made love again.” This quote shows Carver’s flat prose. There are an abundance of descriptive actions and dialogue

This self-evaluation helps the characters overcome their crisis of communication, which progressively transforms them throughout the story. Minimalism simultaneously affects the different forms of communication in Carvers writing.

Born on May 25, 1938 in Clatskanie, Oregon, Raymond Carver was destined to be a writer. He was a son of a sawmill worker and grew up working hard majority of his life. He married year after he finished high school and had two children with his wife at the time. He raised and supported his children with normal working class jobs such as delivering, janitorial and gas station services. Carver discovered his interest in writing after taking a creative writing course in college in 1958. His first success was in 1967 from the story “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” and ended up becoming a fulltime writer after losing his job at the time. He drank heavily and had problems with alcoholism around the same time, but he shortly recovered from that and started teaching at the University of Texas at El Paso and Syracuse University. A few years later in 1983 he won a literary award which made him focus on his full-time writing. His short story collection consisted of “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” “Cathedral,” and “Where I’m Calling from.” In his short stories he mostly wrote about the everyday lives most experienced and problems of the poor, broken marriages, and financial problems. He died at the age of 50 of lung cancer but his stories continue to live on.

Typically a story begins with an exposition, which introduces the characters, setting and plot. In the short story ?Popular Mechanics? by Raymond Carver, the exposition is excluded. The story begins with a short rise in action, moves quickly to the climax and totally omits the resolution. Carver uses third person objective narration to reveal the actions and the dialogue between a man and a woman. The narrator gives very little descriptive details, never revealing the characters? thoughts or their motivation. This allows the reader the freedom to interpret and develop their own opinions of the setting, plot, and characters of the story. This also stimulates the reader to

You see, I haven’t told you everything. There’s something else,” (33) Carver does not let the reader know what Clara has to tell to Arnold and the only reason to get rid of the doubt is to keep reading. Carver presents uncertainty and humans are fearful of the unknown. If the reader continues to read he will get a temporary feeling when not knowing is not a threat anymore. When the reader knows that there is something that they don’t know the only way to solve the mystery is to keep reading.

Raymond Carver’s characters were considered to be very much like him: “’on the edge: of poverty, alcoholic self-destruction, loneliness” (Mays 32). His short story “Cathedral” is about a young couple, who have a visitor coming to stay with them. This visitor, Robert, is the wife’s friend, and he is blind. The narrator, the husband, has never met someone who is blind, was bothered by that. To him, being blind meant constantly needing help from others. His depiction of blindness was what he has seen in the movies. “I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit… A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to,” he tells the reader (Carver 32). His wife on the other hand, was very happy to see her old friend. She had worked for Robert

Through the author's use of diction, more aspects of the narrator's personality are revealed. Simply from word choice, we learn that the narrator is prejudicial towards others, and jealous of other men's relationships with his wife. When facing the situation of Robert coming to town to visit his wife, the narrator blatantly expresses that "a blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to" (Carver 209). This repeated substitution of "blind man"

   To a reader unfamiliar with his work, Raymond Carver's short story, "Little Things" may seem devoid of all literary devices owning to good writing. Fortunately, these people are mistaken. With his minimalistic style, it is what Carver doesn't write that makes his work so effective. Most of Carver's short stories describe situations that many people could find themselves in and that is why his work is so appealing to readers. They are not restricted to harsh explicative details or over-dramatized language, but are allowed to create their own rationale for the actions of the characters and the consequent results.