Carver is generally considered the leading writer of the school of fiction called minimalism, which—as its name implies—eliminates all but the most important details. Minimalists are noted for using simple language and focusing on factual statements, implying rather than attempting to explain precisely what is going on inside their characters. The reader of a minimalist story is forced to make inferences from what the characters do and say. For example, it can be inferred that the narrator of “Cathedral” and his wife are not getting along well and might be on the verge of divorce. Indeed, the most striking thing about “Cathedral” is its simplicity of language. This type of narration from the viewpoint of a simple, uneducated man creates an impression of truthfulness, as the narrator seems too naïve to be dishonest or evasive.

Characteristically, Carver neither names nor describes the two principal characters and does not even reveal where the story takes place. Like other minimalist fiction writers, such as Ann Beattie, Carver deletes every word that he possibly can and even deletes punctuation marks whenever possible. The effect of minimalism is to engage one’s imagination, forcing the reader to make guesses and assumptions and thereby participate in the creative process.

In “Cathedral,” as in many of his other stories, Carver uses a narrator who is a faux naïf, like the narrators of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Such “naïve” narrators supposedly do not understand the full import of what they are telling. This narrative device enhances verisimilitude, characterizes and creates sympathy for the narrator, and provides a basis for humor. The typical point of stories involving faux naïf narrator-protagonists is that they experience events that teach them something about life or about themselves, thereby making them less naïve. In identifying with the narrator, the reader vicariously experiences the learning event and feels changed by the story.

Minimalist short-story writers often write about seemingly trivial domestic incidents and tend to avoid what James Joyce called “epiphanies”—sudden intuitive perceptions of a higher spiritual meaning to life. Minimalists have been attacked as having nothing to say because they do not offer solutions to the existential problems they dramatize in their stories. In a typical Carver story, little changes; his endings might be called “mini-epiphanies.” This is characteristic of minimalists, who usually display a nihilistic outlook and do not believe there are answers to life’s larger questions. Carver’s “downbeat” endings tend to leave the reader depressed or perplexed—and this is the intention. Carver tried to capture the feelings of alienation and frustration that are so much a part of modern life.

Carver has been credited with single-handedly reviving interest in the short story, a genre that had been perfected by American authors beginning with Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe but had been rapidly declining in popularity and social influence with the advent of television after World War II. Some readers dislike Carver’s stories because they seem depressing or pointless. Others appreciate them because they are so truthful. He writes about working-class folk who lead lives of quiet desperation, are chronically in debt, and often overdrink. He tells bitter truths but has an indestructible sense of humor that always shines through. It is impossible to appreciate “Cathedral” without being aware of its offbeat humor, such as in the narrator’s offer to take the blind man bowling and his wife’s reaction to that bizarre suggestion. The subtle humor spicing this poignant story is typically Carveresque.

Raymond Carver’s decision to dedicate Cathedral to the memory of John Gardner, from whom Carver took a writing course in the fall of 1958, may seem rather odd to many readers. Gardner’s expansive stories and novels sprawl across page after page as the author seeks to affirm the eternal verities of moral fiction. Carver’s fiction is written in an entirely different mode: concise, elliptical, and tightly controlled, suggestive rather than (as with Gardner) exhaustive. This style, which several reviewers have inaccurately termed minimalist, is as clipped as Ernest Hemingway’s and as incisive and emotionally detached as Joan Didion’s. Nevertheless, Carver and Gardner do resemble each other in one most important way: their shared commitment to “values and craft,” as Carver phrases it in his foreword to Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist (1982).

Since the publication of his first collection of stories in 1977, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, Carver’s distinctive prose style and commitment to the craft of fiction have provoked widely divergent critical judgments. Although his work has been richly and deservedly praised—his first collection was nominated for a National Book Award, while his second, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), helped Carver win the prestigious Mildred and Harold Straus Living Award—the two books (comprising thirty-nine at times very short stories) have led a few reviewers to question whether Carver’s style and “terrifying vision of ordinary human life in our country” (as Leonard Michaels once described it) has hardened into fashionable despair and mere literary affectation. The criticism is understandable but by no means merited, especially now that Cathedral has appeared, a work which, even as it recalls the earlier stories, marks a distinct advance in both the author’s vision and his narrative aesthetic.

Before discussing this advance, it is necessary to establish the chief object of Carver’s concern, the lives of his characters. These characters are not, as one reviewer has complained, “morbid caricatures”; rather, they are only as monotonous and monochromatic as the featureless, middle-class or lower-middle-class America in which they live—a world, incidentally, that Carver has progressively stripped of particular geographical details in order to focus better and more intensively on the internal lives of his characters. Carver does for his segment of the contemporary American population what Didion has done for her more affluent characters; he has portrayed a world in which the individual has been stripped of all the usual forms of support—family, religion, politics, economic security, shared culture, and so forth. Radically cut off from what once served to preserve and sustain human life, his characters necessarily fall back on themselves and their own meager resources. One dreams of living “in an old house surrounded by a wall”; another believes that she and her husband will thrive within the self-contained world of their marriage, but then the husband-narrator unintentionally makes clear how impoverished their lives actually are: “Some nights we went to a movie. Other nights we just stayed in and watched TV. Sometimes Fran baked things for me and we’d eat whatever it was all in a sitting.” Here is a quiet desperation such as Henry David Thoreau never could have imagined. For these people, transcendence seems less a problem than an impossibility. The simple, seemingly trivial ways in which their uncertainty manifests itself—what, for example, to bring one’s nominal friends when invited to dinner at their house—suggests a deeper dis-ease. They begin to discover the drab truth of certain clichés—time is what passes you by, dreams “are what you wake up from.” What they wake to is a dim perception of the fragility of their lives and of bad situations getting slowly but inexorably worse.

They do not concern themselves with the problems of radioactive waste, the greenhouse effect, or nuclear war; their disasters are not environmental or international but intensely personal. “Without looking, the birthday boy stepped off the curb at an intersection and was immediately knocked down by a car.” In another story, J. P. gets everything he wants: marriage, good job, children, house. Then, slowly and inexplicably, he begins drinking, and his life falls apart. These characters come to realize that their seemingly safe domestic lives have transmogrified into minor, even commonplace tragedies in which, as helpless victims, they can at best hope to endure rather than, as William Faulkner had it, prevail. As Carver explained in an interview, “They’d like to set things right, but they can’t” and so are left just trying to “do the best they can.” Often, the best is not much. In the aptly titled story “Preservation,” husband and wife spend a night discussing what he can do now that he has lost his job as a roofer, “but they couldn’t think of anything,” and so the husband spends the next three months lying on the living-room sofa. The narrator of “Where I’m Calling From” (the “where” refers to a rehabilitation house for alcoholics) adopts a similarly fatalistic view. “I’ve been here once before. What’s to say? I’m back. . . . Part of me wanted help. But there was another part.” In turning to alcohol, he is turning away from the pain of a failed marriage and eventually from all potentially painful human relationships. As he says in explaining why he will not call his girlfriend, also an alcoholic, who has recently learned she has vaginal cancer: “I hope she’s okay. But if she has something wrong with her, I don’t want to know about it.” Given such an attitude, the reader usually finds it easier to understand and sympathize with Carver’s isolates than to like them.

In rehabilitation houses, furnished rooms, and rented apartments, loneliness stalks these characters, often driving them to acts that only further separate them from others. Wes, for example (in “Chef’s House”), rents a house from his friend Chef and, like Carver, makes an apparently successful recovery from alcoholism. In Wes’s mind, however, the recovery is mysteriously linked to the rented house, a home of sorts, and when Chef says he needs the house for his daughter, the recovery abruptly ends, leaving Wes and his wife (who left her lover for Wes’s sake) homeless and alone. The story’s closing lines effectively summarize just how transient their lives are and how precarious is their hold on everyday existence: “Wes got up and pulled the drapes and the ocean was gone just like that. I went in to start supper. We still had some fish in the icebox. There wasn’t much else. We’ll clean it up tonight, I thought, and that will be the end of it.” As the narrator of “The Bridle” says about four different yet similar characters, “These people look whipped.” In Carver’s fiction, they often do.

The vision is bleak but convincing, the author relentless in his depiction of the darker side of ordinary American life yet compassionate as well, detached but never condescending. Something of a Samuel Beckett of the blue-collar classes, Carver has not until recently mixed his compassion for his characters with an equal measure of hope. It is precisely here that Cathedral represents a distinct advance over the previous works, a movement toward what Carver has called a more “generous” fiction that is particularly evident in the collection’s two finest pieces, “A Small, Good Thing” and “Cathedral.” A much shorter and much less “generous” version of “A Small, Good Thing” appeared under the title “The Bath” in Carver’s second collection. In that earlier version, a mother orders a birthday cake for her son, Scotty, who, on the morning of his birthday, is struck by a car and falls into a coma. While in the hospital, the baker (without identifying himself and apparently without any knowledge of the accident) calls the house several times, asking the parents (whichever one happens to be home at the time) if they have forgotten Scotty—meaning the cake, though they immediately—and guiltily—think of their son. Reading the story is a painful experience, especially for the reader who also may be a parent. The longer version, of which “The Bath,” slightly but significantly revised, forms the first half, is even more emotionally trying. In the second half of “A Small, Good Thing,” Scotty dies, and his stunned parents return home to face both the loss of their only child and the sudden emptiness of their own lives as well. The wife says, “He’s gone and now we’ll have to get used to that.” Before they can even begin to adjust, the phone rings; the wife realizes the caller’s identity and demands that her husband drive her to the bakery. The confrontation very nearly turns violent, but then a transformation occurs; the anger turns into grief, the grief into a special kind of understanding. Realizing what he has done, the baker asks for forgiveness and explains that while he is not evil, as the woman has claimed, neither is he entirely human. Lonely and childless, he has somehow lost his humanity, and it is the sense of loss that binds these three people together. “You have to eat and keep going,” the baker tells the grieving parents, offering them the rolls and bread he has made. “Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this.” In this moment of communion (no other word will do to describe it), the baker regains what he has lost—as do the parents—becoming at once father and son to the childless couple, who, as the story ends, continue to sit at his table and “did not think of leaving.”

“Cathedral”—the first to have been written of the twelve stories in the collection—is arguably the best, a tour de force in which Carver seems determined to prove to himself as well as to the reader that in the contemporary wasteland, redemption is still possible, as it clearly was not in most of the author’s earlier fictions. As with all of his stories, the plot of “Cathedral” is simple and straightforward. A blind man named Robert visits the narrator and his wife, who worked for Robert some ten years before. The real story occurs not in the events of Robert’s visit but in the narrator’s changing attitude toward his unwanted guest. The blind man’s presence makes the narrator feel self-conscious (as if he, not Robert, were the stranger), even jealous and resentful. Robert, he thinks, may actually know more about his wife than he does. (The wife and the blind man have exchanged tape-recorded “letters” throughout the ten years.) At first, the narrator mentally derides Robert as “spiffy” and “creepy,” but gradually he begins to observe the blind man more closely. His scrutiny leads first to understanding and then, as in “A Small, Good Thing,” to his sympathetic identification with his guest. Whereas earlier he found Robert’s presence “disconcerting,” now the narrator is glad to have his company and concerned that Robert may not be able to visualize a cathedral from his description of it on the television screen. The problem stems less from Robert’s physiological blindness than from the narrator’s spiritual blindness—his self-centeredness and lack of faith in anything or anyone, including himself. He cannot describe a cathedral adequately, even to himself, because cathedrals do not really mean anything to him; nothing does. In the story’s remarkable conclusion, Robert asks the narrator to draw a cathedral while the blind man holds his hand. The narrator begins with a simple box that reminds him of his own house and then adds a roof, spires, arches, windows, flying buttresses: “I couldn’t stop.” Closing his eyes, he continues to draw, and as he draws he loses all of the anxiety, selfishness, and feeling of confinement that characterized him earlier. For the first time, he is free to understand, as the blind man has apparently understood all of his life despite the loss of his sight and of his wife, that “It’s really something”—the mystical “it” being purposely left undefined.

The blind man teaches the sighted narrator to see their shared world and to desire to live in it. The seeing in “Cathedral” corresponds to Carver’s purpose in writing these stories. His characters have an urgent need to explain themselves, their lives, and more especially their failures, but, like the woman in “A Small, Good Thing” who “didn’t know how to begin” or the man in “Careful” who “didn’t know where to start,” they are unable to articulate the point of their stories—the point, really, of their lives. Carver’s purpose, however, is not to explain; it is, more humbly, to “allow certain areas of life to be understood a little better than they were before.” These “certain areas” are only superficially socioeconomic in nature; as the resemblance between his fictions and those of Beckett, Didion, Renata Adler, John Cheever, and Walker Percy suggests, Carver’s concern is not with the problems of any one class but rather with the universal condition of psychological and spiritual exhaustion that afflicts contemporary man.

In his three collections, Carver has illuminated the darkened lives of his defeated and bewildered characters; only in Cathedral, however, has he begun to affirm, as John Gardner would have said, the emotional values that enable them to go on in the face of what appear to be overwhelming odds and certain defeat. His is a stoic vision, one that is tempered, however, by the possibility—no longer so terrifyingly remote—of understanding and perhaps even love.

Economic Climate
The characters in Carver's short stories, including “Cathedral,” live in an era of declining expectations. In 1978, approximately 11.7 percent of the U.S. population was classified as "poor" according to government standards. This rate had been on a steady decline since 1960. However, starting in 1978, poverty rates began to rise again. During the early years of the Reagan administration, high inflation, high interest rates, and high unemployment signaled a recession that dampened American economic optimism. By 1982, the unemployment rate had reached 10.8 percent. Ironically, the wealthy saw their fortunes grow during this period, widening the gap between rich and poor.

Even more troubling, many employed workers earned wages insufficient to lift them above the poverty line, earning them the label "the working poor." In 1988, 40 percent of all poor individuals were employed but still remained below the poverty threshold. Consequently, for many Americans, the 1980s were marked by fear and anxiety; issues like illness, lack of transportation, or other hardships could push entire families into severe economic distress.

Carver and his family were part of the working poor. By 1958, he was married with two children and often found himself in low-paying, low-status jobs. Despite both he and his wife working, their combined income barely sustained them. Their struggles were compounded by Carver's alcoholism, leading the family to declare bankruptcy twice and start over.

Similarly, the characters in Carver's short stories live lives filled with near-panic. If they have jobs, they are generally dissatisfied with them. Many critics describe Carver as a "blue-collar realist," meaning his characters are often based on people like himself, striving to maintain relationships, overcome isolation, and find hope amidst despair.

Social Climate
During times of recession and diminishing expectations, stress levels rise, alcoholism increases, and marriages suffer. In Carver's stories, disaster always seems imminent. His characters typically have jobs, but these jobs fail to fulfill them emotionally or intellectually. They drift through life in existential despair, unable to understand why the American Dream has eluded them. Alcohol and alcoholism are significant themes in Carver's stories. Much like Carver, his characters often use alcohol to escape the stresses of their lives, only to find that it leaves them inarticulate and speechless.

Moreover, while Carver doesn't explicitly mention the social class of his characters, their lifestyles imply they are not affluent. Carver is frequently described as a "spokesperson" for blue-collar, working-class individuals. This is the environment in which he himself matured. Carver's characters, being from a blue-collar, working-class background, often lack both financial and emotional support. They also frequently struggle to articulate their emotions. As Lorna Sage notes when discussing Carver's writing style, "Brevity was the name of his game: the people he spoke for, the white working-class Americans whose voices come over on the page haven't got too many words, or too much of anything else." These characters grapple with the small challenges of daily life, striving to maintain their fragile grip on a lower-middle-class existence. Often, their marriages are fraught with difficulties. In the 1980s United States, many marriages ended in divorce due to the relaxation of divorce laws in various states. Additionally, the extra stress brought on by economic recessions and high unemployment rates also led to an increase in the divorce rate among the lower-middle class during the period when Carver was writing.

Narration and Point of View
One of the most intriguing aspects of ''Cathedral'' is how Carver constructs the narrative point of view. The story is narrated by an unnamed, middle-aged, white male, and it is limited to his perspective. Through his senses, the reader learns about the blind man's forthcoming visit, the narrator's wife's past life, and the progression of the visit. The narrator is not particularly articulate, which results in gaps that the reader must fill. Despite the narrator controlling the information presented, Carver provides ample clues about his personality. By reading closely, the reader can infer details about the narrator that he himself is unaware of. For instance, although he never expresses love for his wife, his jealousy is evident; he refuses to even mention her first husband's name. Additionally, it can be inferred that the narrator is uneasy about blindness, even though he never says this directly. The use of a first-person, limited narrator allows the story to concentrate on the narrator's transformation in the final lines. The story is not just narrated by him; it revolves around him. This change is sudden and unexpected; the narrator does not foresee the epiphany that concludes the story. Readers, too, are taken by surprise. Such an unexpected twist is only achievable in a story where both the narrative and point of view are meticulously controlled.

Imagery
In literature, an image serves as a tool that provides a tangible, sensory description of an idea, object, or character. An image can also become symbolic within a story. In "Cathedral," the dominant image is the cathedral itself. This image evolves from the collection's title to the story's title, to the flickering image on the narrator's television, to the brown paper bag on which the narrator sketches a cathedral, and finally, to the expansive screen of the narrator's imagination. A cathedral is a human creation designed to provide a space for communion between people and the sacred. While Carver does not explicitly make this connection, it is evident that choosing a cathedral as the central image suggests some religious significance. At the very least, a cathedral evokes awe in viewers and readers. At most, the image of the cathedral hints at the transformative powers such a structure possesses.

Epiphany
William Harmon and C. Hugh Holman in A Handbook to Literature define epiphany as ''Literally a manifestation or showing-forth, usually of some divine being.'' They further explain that the term ''epiphany'' was first introduced into literary criticism by James Joyce, ''who used it to describe an event in which the essential nature of something ... was suddenly perceived. It was, therefore, an intuitive grasp of reality achieved in a quick flash of recognition in which something, usually simple and commonplace, is seen in a new light. ...''

In ''Cathedral,'' the narrator experiences such a moment of insight in the story's final lines. With his eyes closed and the blind man's hand guiding his own, he suddenly ''sees'' the cathedral he has been trying to draw. However, what he perceives is much more profound than the image under his hand. Instead, the cathedral symbolizes the potential for transformation in the narrator's life. The epiphany in the story is indeed subtle, and the narrator struggles to articulate it clearly.

However, Carver's writing style is also sparse and minimalist, and the epiphany he presents aligns with this style. Additionally, one common reaction to encountering the sacred is speechlessness, the inability to fully express the experience's reality. Therefore, the narrator's final words, ‘‘It's really something,’’ though vague and general, hint at a larger and more significant intuitive realization. It is as if the narrator suddenly understands that through connecting with another person, he somehow encounters the divine.

Carver's technique primarily revolves around craftsmanship, focusing on the meticulous details of language, action, rhythm, and characterization within a story. His finest works transcend traditional symbolism while still incorporating it. For instance, in "The Bridle," a bridle symbolizes the simple, bygone lifestyle that a farmer and his family have lost. Additionally, the bridle is linked to the farmer's gamble on a racehorse he purchased—a horse that, much like its owner, never wins. The characters' situation amplifies the bridle's symbolic meaning, suggesting the farmer is constrained, guided by the reins of fate.

Beyond symbolism, Carver structures his stories to lead to moments of revelation. "Cathedral" and "A Small Good Thing" serve as striking examples. Both narratives feature recognitions that are simultaneously beautiful and peculiar. Unexpected events occur, yet they feel both natural and inevitable. Carver's finest stories are akin to fictional performances, showcasing feats of skill executed with audacity and elegance.

Raymond Carver's fiction has garnered acclaim for its striking portrayal of the cultural and moral landscape of contemporary America. His narratives reflect the lives of lower-middle-class Americans, highlighting their isolation and despair. Marriage is a recurring theme, often leading to divorce and separation. Carver has stated that his fiction is not intended to incite change or alleviate human suffering. Rather, he aims "to allow certain areas of life to be understood a little better than they were understood before." He achieves this by making his stories highly referential.

1980s: After peaking in the late 1970s, marijuana use begins a decade-long decline. By 1989, reported usage among high school students is half of what it was in 1979.

1990s: Marijuana use appears to be increasing once more, along with its cultivation in the United States. The long-term effects of marijuana use remain unknown.

1980s: In 1980, Ronald Reagan is elected president. As a Republican, Reagan implements tax cuts and significantly boosts military spending.

1990s: Bill Clinton is elected president in 1992. A moderate Democrat, Clinton focuses on social reform, but his presidency is marred by personal scandals that lead to his impeachment.

1980s: Television usage surges. By 1980, over 100 million television sets are in use across the United States. At the start of the decade, roughly 82 percent of American households own at least one color TV.

1990s: Television usage continues to grow significantly. The number of cable channels increases, and direct satellite receivers become more common. By 1995, 98 percent of American households have television sets, averaging one set for every 1.2 people.

1980s: Although the rampant inflation of the 1970s is curbed, the trade deficit persists and the national debt rises rapidly. Some industries recover from the previous decade's recession, while others stagnate. Despite tax cuts, the wealthier segment of society benefits disproportionately, widening the gap between the rich and the poor. An increasing share of the nation's wealth is concentrated in a shrinking percentage of the population.

1990s: Known as the decade of the bull market, the 1990s see steady economic growth. By the end of the decade, the unemployment rate hits an all-time low. However, real earning power declines, and the wealth gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen.

Carver has expressed his admiration for past fiction masters like Tolstoy, Flaubert, and Chekhov, as well as Hemingway, Joyce, and Durrell. He has also commended contemporary writers such as Updike, Beattie, Mason, and Tobias Wolff. His literary influences include these and other authors whose works demonstrate a respect for the subtleties of spoken language, an eye for unexpected details, and a meticulous approach to structure.

Similar to Hemingway, Carver relies extensively on dialogue to convey meaning. Like Chekhov, he maintains a delicate balance of sympathy and judgment towards his characters. And akin to the Joyce of the Dubliners stories, Carver's finest stories are marked by moments of epiphany.

Sources
Allen, Bruce, A review of Cathedral, The Christian Science Monitor, November 4, 1983, p. B4.

Broyard, Anatole, A review of Cathedral, The New York Times, September 5, 1983, p. 27.

Howe, Irving, A review of Cathedral, The New York Times Book Review, September 11, 1983, pp. 42-3.

Meyer, Adam, Raymond Carver, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995, pp. 182-183.

Mullin, Bill, “A Subtle Spectacle: Television Culture in the Short Stories of Raymond Carver,” Critique, Vol. 39, No. 1, Winter, 1998, pp. 99-114.

Nesset, Kirk, “Insularity and Self-Enlargement in Raymond Carver's Cathedral,” Essays in Literature, Vol. 21, No. 1, Spring, 1994, pp. 116-29.

Nesset, Kirk, The Stories of Raymond Carver: A Critical Study, Ohio University Press, 1995, p. 71.

Powell, Jon, “The Stories of Raymond Carver: The Menace of Perpetual Uncertainty,” Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 31, No. 3, Fall, 1994, pp. 647-56.

Rubins, Josh, A review of Cathedral, The New York Review of Books, November 24, 1983, pp. 40-42.

Sage, Lorna, A review of Elephant, The Observer, August 14, 1988, p. 41.

Simpson, Mona, and Lewis Buzbee, An interview with Raymond Carver, In Conversations with Raymond Carver, edited by Marshall Bruce Gentry and William L. Stull, University of Mississippi Press, 1990, pp. 31-52.

Trussler, Michael, “The Narrowed Voice: Minimalism and Raymond Carver,” Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 31, No. 1, Winter, 1994, pp. 23-37.

Further Reading
Barth, John, “A Few Words About Minimalism,” The New York Times Book Review, December 28, 1986, pp. 1-2, 25.
In this concise piece, Barth defines minimalism and situates it within a social and cultural framework. He argues that minimalism and "Cathedral" should be considered together, as they “create together what they could not have done by themselves.”

Runyon, Randolph Paul, Reading Raymond Carver, Syracuse University Press, 1992
An excellent introductory critical overview of Carver's work.

Saltzman, Arthur M., Understanding Raymond Carver, University of South Carolina Press.
A chapter-length analysis of the collection, Cathedral.