the living room. From the clues in the story, we know that the location of this house is five hours by train from Connecticut:

So he was visiting the dead wife’s relatives in Connecticut. He called my wife from his in-law’s. Arrangements were made. He would come by train, a five-hour trip, and my wife would meet him at the station.

We also know that the train trip includes a “scenic ride along the Hudson.” So we can conclude from these clues that the story is likely set in upstate New York.

In addition to the physical setting, we can also consider the time that the story is set in. There are a few clues in the story about the time that the story is set. The first is that the characters discuss the difference between color TV and black & white TV sets and that the narrator and his wife only “traded up” to a color set recently. The second clue is that the narrator’s wife and the blind man communicated by recording themselves on tapes and posting them to each other. This happens for nine years before Robert meets the blind man—the first tape is sent “after a year or so,” referring to the summer that the narrator's wife spent working for Robert. It’s unclear in the story whether the characters are using cassette tapes or micro-cassettes: the narrator only refers to them as tapes. It’s likely that the narrator’s wife and Robert preferred to communicate this way due to the high price of long-distance phone calls at the time.

These two technological clues hint that the ten years described in the story are roughly between the mid-1960s—when the color TV, cassettes, and micro-cassettes became available in the USA—and 1981, when the story was written.

The setting of the story is the narrator's house. Much of the story takes place in the living room. It is a room with a brand new sofa, purchased just two weeks before, a "big" chair, and a color television set. It has a window that looks out over the driveway, and it opens onto a front porch. It has a place to mix drinks, since the narrator does so while talking to Robert, the blind man. Since the story was written in 1983, we can imagine an ordinary early 1980s suburban house.

The story also takes place for a time in the dining room where the narrator, his wife, and Robert eat dinner. They eat a typical all-American meal of meat, scalloped potatoes, beans, bread, and butter, and strawberry pie for dessert.

The very ordinariness of the house mirrors how ordinary the narrator is and underlines how extraordinary it is for him to be confronted with and have his mind stretched by a blind man who his wife has been friends with for years.

This story is set in a fairly unremarkable suburban house. This seems to be a deliberate choice—the narrator and his wife live ordinary, middle-class lives, and the narrator's initial impressions of his wife's friend, the blind man, stem from the idea that he must live a life very alien and different to the one he knows. The narrator does his job even though he doesn't enjoy it, because he doesn't much know what else he would do. With his wife, he pursues a very standard sort of existence; it is supposed to represent something universal to the modern American experience.

The blind man, Robert, comes into this setting and brings something important with him. The cathedral of the story's title is not a real cathedral, on one hand, but on the other it represents a setting the narrator did not know was available to him: the inside of his own mind. By encouraging him to draw and build his own cathedral, Robert, although he is blind, allows the narrator to see far more than he knew he was capable of.

Their home is a very ordinary place, and this is important because it reflects on the ordinariness of the narrator and gives further meaning to the extraordinary experience of drawing the cathedral with the blind man, and the difference between the holiness of the cathedral and his home.  By the end of the story, significantly, "setting" no longer matters at all. It is not important what the narrator sees or where he is but what he feels and imagines:  "My eyes were still closed.  I was in my house.  I knew that.  But I didn't feel like I was inside anything."  His emotional capacity expands, transcending the limitations of any physical space.

It takes place in the home of the narrator and his wife. They are a married couple who aren't happy with their lives until Rober arrives. Robert, the blind man, is coming to see the couple, and the narrator isn't too happy about it at the beginning. The epiphany he experiences, however, changes him.

A conflict arises with the confrontation of two opposing parties. Generally the conflict includes the protagonist pitted against an antagonist, whether it be represented as his conscience, nature, God, society or self.

In "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver, the conflict is man vs self. Robert, an old blind friend of the narrator's wife is coming for a visit. His wife has recently died. The narrator is angry that the man is coming and is hostile toward him. At first it seems that he is jealous of the attention his wife is giving Robert. However, I believe that the conflict is within the narrator, not with Robert. The narrator has certain perceptions about Robert, his wife, how Robert should act, how the narrator should fit into the picture, etc. The problem is his own; but throughout, Robert is very gracious about it all.

Because the conflict is man vs self, interestingly, I find that the antagonist is the narrator—or more specifically, his anger with Robert, which may simply be a manifestation of his frustration with the world around him.

Lilia Melani provides the following definition for "antagonist:"

The antagonist is the opponent; the antagonist may be society, nature, a person, or an aspect of the protagonist.

This makes perfect sense in light of the conflict of man vs self. It is not until the narrator can "let go" of his anger with Robert and the world that he finally is able to resolve his hostility. (His anger and hostility are the "aspect" of the narrator that acts as the antagonist.

Robert talks the narrator into drawing with him—having the narrator's hand guide Robert's. It is not something that the narrator had expected. He follows Robert's directions, but feels like what they are doing is crazy.

So I began. First I drew a box that looked like a house. It could have been the house I lived in. Then I put a roof on it. At either end of the roof, I drew spires. Crazy.

Robert and the narrator continue to draw and Robert praises the narrator's work even though, ironically, Robert cannot see what the narrator is drawing, but he can feel the deep impressions the narrator makes on the paper. However, perhaps the picture is not what is important at all, for he tells the narrator:

Never thought anything like this could happen in your lifetime, did you, bub? Well, it's a strange life, we all know that.

This may summarize the narrator's difficulty. He has lost his ability to hope and imagine. He has less "vision" than Robert, and in this exercise, the blind man is leading the blind man: though one is blind figuratively (the narrator), while the other (Robert) is blind literally.

As the narrator starts to realize possibilities that emerge on the paper in front of him, he finds he cannot stop. All the while Robert is encouraging his companion. Sleeping on the couch, the narrator's wife wakes and wants to know what they are doing. Robert has to explain, for the narrator still cannot stop—doesn't speak. And still Robert praises him:

You didn't think you could. But you can, can't you?

Then Robert tells him to draw with his eyes closed. This would seem impossible to do. But the narrator does it: he does the impossible, and he notes:

It was like nothing else in my life up to now.

The eNotes summary puts it quite nicely:

Something has happened to him that has changed his understanding of life...No longer hostile to Robert, no longer aware of Robert's blindness, the narrator experiences the possibility of change in his life.

Raymond Carver's short story "Cathedral" is not said to take place in a specific city, but we may infer that "Cathedral" likely happens somewhere in New York. At the story's open, the narrator remarks that "[Robert] was visiting...relatives in Connecticut" and that "he would come by train, a five hour trip" to visit the narrator and his wife (paragraph 1). This implies that the narrator and his wife live within a five hour radius of Connecticut. Later over dinner, some of the group's small-talk revolves around New York:

"Then I wanted to say something else, small-talk, about the scenic ride along the Hudson. How going to New York, you should sit on the right-hand side of the train, and coming from New York, the left-hand side" (paragraph 24). 

The implication that the story takes place in New York matches the story's theme of how perceptions of reality may be relative even in a quiet and dull area. New York is typified as an artistic and free place, and even though the narrator and his wife live in the suburbs, the artistic nature of the city may have an influence on their evening with Robert.