Carver: Cathedral (short story)

Raymond Carver

If you seriously for a moment that thesis assumes that claims that there are only a limited number of stories in the world, and the illusion of infinity arises only through the artistic variation of storytelling, then we come to Raymond Carver on a kind of nucleus and enters to where these stories take their beginning. Carver makes it inconspicuous to the whole, by whenever the issues are bigger than the explanations that breaks down and turns to something else. It is the art of omission, the way is to embrace the things, without revealing it, which gives these stories their power and they can continue to live after the last word deliberately banal. Carver's hypnotic power lies in its terseness. Every word seems incontrovertible as set in stone, un-ambitious in the meaning and firmly anchored in its unadorned prose (Saltzman, 21). 

Carver writes really good scary stories, and his short stories are unquestionably among the best the genre. Raymond Carver's short stories have appeared just after classic. They also influenced many young German authors, such as Ingo Schulze, Judith Hermann, who has written a chatty way, and superfluous preface to the tape (Meyer, 101).

In the term "short story" Raymond Carver has coined his short life and his few collections of stories like no other American author. The Berlin-Verlag now published as the third volume of a projected complete edition of the collection of Carver "Cathedral". From the other side of the American dream tells Carver, rather it is the men each and every women in Western civilization populate his stories. He reported in the most concise, laconic way of lingering sunsets, which as the stories themselves have no beginning and no end, and certainly not a happy ending (Campbell, 13).

Cathedral

“Cathedral," the title story to one of Carver's most acclaimed collections, opens with the narrator's concern over a blind friend of his wife's who's coming to spend the night. Appearing first in Atlantic Monthly and reprinted in Best American Short Stories, 1982, Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" exemplifies his departure from the minimalist style of his earlier three collections. It is also acclaimed as one of the finest efforts from one of our greatest short story writers. Carver himself seemingly sensed as much; in an interview with Mona Simpson, he remarked: "When I wrote 'Cathedral' I experienced this rush and I felt, 'This is what it's all about, this is the reason we do this'" (quoted in Mona Simpson interview, "The Art of Fiction" 76 Paris Review [1983]: 207).

The story opens with the agitated narrator awaiting the visit of Robert, an old friend of the narrator's wife. Robert, who is blind, has recently suffered the death of his wife. The narrator resents Robert's visit, in part because the blind man represents a connection to his wife's past: She worked for Robert as a reader in Seattle, during her relationship with a childhood sweetheart that ended badly. Because his wife and Robert communicate (via audiotape), the blind man also represents a part of his ...