The narrator gives curt replies to Robert’s genuine attempts at conversation and he even turns on the television, which the sightless Robert cannot appreciate fully, in an attempt to both stop the conversation and exert his dominance over Robert, since the narrator is deeply jealous of Robert’s friendship with his wife. He passive-aggressively points out all kinds of things Robert can’t do: the narrator asks his wife if Robert likes bowling and then asks Robert which side of the train he sat on during his trip (inquiring implicitly whether he sat on the side with a good view). Initially, the narrator imagines that Robert will be strange and pathetic. While the husband, who is the story’s narrator, initially believes that having Robert in the house will be inconvenient and unsettling, he comes to realize that blindness is not simply a deficit-Robert’s fine-tuned perception adds to the narrator’s own appreciation of the world. The story affirms something.īruce Allen of The Christian Science Monitor considered 'Cathedral' to be 'among the year's finest fiction,' and he wrote, 'The story is about learning how to imagine, and feel - and it's the best example so far of the way Raymond Carver's accomplished miniaturist art is stretching itself, exploring new territories.' Samuel Coale of The Providence Journal praised the way an 'unpoetic soul' is able to describe the cathedral to a blind man: 'Even in such nihilistic landscapes, epiphanies are still possible, and Carver makes us feel them with a quiet, smouldering joy that only such accurate and unblurred landscapes in fiction can produce.In “Cathedral,” the lives of a married couple are disrupted when the wife’s blind friend, Robert, comes to visit.

He puts himself in the blind man's place. The character there is full of prejudices against blind people. The story 'Cathedral' seemed to me completely different from everything I'd written before. 'Cathedral' is generally considered to be one of Carver's finest works, displaying both his expertise in crafting a minimalist story and also writing about a catharsis with such simple storylines. It is the final story in Carver's collection Cathedral (1983). The short story 'Cathedral' was included in the 1982 edition of Best American Short Stories.

It is the title story of a collection published in 1983: Cathedral. It was the first story written after finishing What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. ' Cathedral' is a short story written by American writer and poet Raymond Carver.

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