I’ve always believed that the best stories are those that get you thinking long after you’ve read the last page. The beauty of writing is that you have complete control over the fate of the reader. Most successful stories leave you with a feeling almost as if you are lost in a literary forest at dusk, where you see only glimpses of your surroundings. It is up to you to interpret the details and hints given, get your footing, and find your way to the end. Luckily, this forest has multiple paths, multiple ways to escape. For the most part, I feel that Raymond Carver follows his own advice in “Cathedral.” We don’t really know what is going on in this house, what will happen to the visitor and the almost dreamlike, blurry mood and tone of the ending leaves the reader with some discomfort, but the kind that makes you want to find out what’s wrong and explore.
We feel immediate tension between the husband and wife. The story also hints at marital troubles because although we are told that the narrator’s wife writes a couple poems each year when important things happen, he makes no effort to find out about this poetry or what it might mean to his wife. From what we see, every time the couple speaks to each other, it’s usually in a snippy, terse, or annoyed manner. Most importantly, how the narrator tells us his story and his choice of words tell us a lot about what type of person he is. He seems to joke all the time, and hasn’t matured emotionally. One of the main causes of tension between husband and wife is that he is very unhappy to find out that her blind friend Robert is coming to stay with them. He has these misconceptions of blind people and even pities Robert’s deceased wife for having to have lived with a husband who cannot even see her.
I felt the “sense of menace” from the beginning. I mean, the guy DOESN’T like blind people. One of his wife’s oldest friends is blind AND is going to be sleeping in his house! This didn’t add up from the start so I was intrigued to find out what would happen once Robert arrived. Would the narrator be mean? Rude? Kick him out or get in a fight? I also worried that the wife might have deeper feelings for Robert than just as a friend because… I mean come on. You read how she was describing him. Even I would feel a tinge of jealousy if my spouse was telling me how it felt to have someone’s hands on them, blind or not (does that make me a bad person?). From what we’ve been reading so far, I was expecting Robert to drop dead or for the wife to have an affair, but “Cathedral” had a surprisingly feel-good ending. I think it made even more of an impact because of the stereotypes the narrator had about blind people and the discomfort he felt of having to see this man.
Despite the relatively happy ending, I was left with a sense of, “what just happened?” It felt as though I had also been drinking and smoking with Robert and the narrator. Raymond Carver slowly weaves you into the story and you don’t expect for the two men to have physical contact and to bond. The fact that Carver left out why the narrator didn’t open his eyes or what happens afterward only strengthens the story. Once you’re done with the physical pages, you come up with your own interpretation of how you’d want it to end and the story continues to live on.
I remember an elementary school teacher, the grade slips my mind, who would always say, “I know you’re hearing me, but are you listening to what I’m saying?” This was usually followed by an exaggerated rolling of the students’ eyes. Years later, it still sticks with me and I realize the significance of this statement. The same is true in “Cathedral.” It takes a man without sight, Robert, for the narrator to realize that all along he has merely been looking but not truly seeing. Is the narrator truly happy at the end or is he intoxicated? How do you think this idea of “looking but not seeing” is related to happiness?