Both "Cathedral" and "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" examine what love is, in its different forms and in married and unmarried relationships.
“Cathedral” presents platonic and romantic relationships that have varying degrees of success. The narrator’s wife forms a genuine connection with a blind man, Robert, to whom she read during one summer ten years ago. After moving apart geographically, they continue to correspond and even confide in each other: the woman tells Robert about her dissatisfaction as an officer’s wife and her attempted suicide, and Robert reveals the last days spent with his dying wife. The narrator and his wife, though, do not seem as close. His wife grows annoyed at the narrator’s reluctance to host Robert when he visits. She told him, “If you love me, you can do this for me. If you don’t love me, okay.”
The story...
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"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” introduces two married couples: Mel and Terri (married four years, together five years) and Nick and Laura (married eighteen months). Before Terri was in a relationship with Mel, she was involved with a volatile and possessive man named Ed. Despite his abuse of her, Terri believes that Ed truly loved her “in his own way.” Mel disagrees and comments, “I just wouldn’t call Ed’s behavior love.” Mel and Terri seem like an old married couple to the newlyweds Nick and Laura, who touch and maintain contact during most of the story. When Nick makes a point to kiss Laura’s hand so that everyone will witness his gallant affection, Terri tells them that they’re only in the honeymoon phase and implies that it won’t last by saying, “Wait awhile.”
The married couples in both stories may or may not be strongly connected by love, whatever love really is. Nonetheless, both stories describe solid and touching marriage bonds—perhaps true love—between tertiary characters. In "Cathedral," Robert and his wife, Beulah, were “inseparable for eight years” until she died, with Robert beside her hospital bed. In "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," an elderly married couple remain inseparable while recovering in the hospital, even to the point where the elderly man grows depressed because he can’t see his wife next to him.
The two stories are rich for comparisons of relationships between characters. Most importantly, they illustrate varying strengths and depths of connections between characters, reflecting how meaningful those relationships may be to the characters, as well as the characters’ abilities to connect to others.
References
In Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" and "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," the author explores the idea that no matter how close and intimate we become with others, both emotionally and physically, we can never truly comprehend how another person experiences life. The separateness and isolation we experience as individuals can never be truly transcended, though we may crave it and seek it through shared experiences.
The couples in "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" seek to shed inhibitions and separation by dulling their senses with alcohol. The altered state they experience together and universal topic they choose to discuss, love, ultimately prove to be an unsatisfying attempt to connect with each other on anything more than a conversational level.
Similarly, in "Cathedral," the anecdote about the blind man touching the face and neck of the woman who had been helping him was an attempt for him to transcend the separation he felt from her. Carver may be suggesting that even through touch, other people are ultimately unknowable, but at the same time, it is the human condition to keep trying to make a connection that will always remain out of reach. This point is made again when the two men draw together, hands touching, without seeing. It is a metaphor for how we can never truly share the experiences and perceptions of another person.
One major similarity between the two stories is an anxiety about the difficulty of true communication and understanding (especially in terms of language). In “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” the four characters try to pin down exactly what love is over the course of their conversation. Each character gives different examples in an attempt to illustrate the concept of love, but no one is able to give an actual definition. Readers can sense the anxiety these characters feel at not reaching a shared understanding of love when Terri pleads with Mel: “He did love me though, Mel. Grant me that.”
When language fails, it appears as though physical intimacy could perhaps emerge as a shared definition of love. Laura explains that she knows what love is, and as a way of explaining it, the narrator kisses Laura’s hand. However, immediately, Terri dismisses that as not an act of real love, explaining that this is just what new lovers do, and they’ll grow out of it.
The anxieties about communication are made more explicit in “Cathedral” because the narrator has to figure out a way to explain visual stimulus to a blind man. Interestingly, language fails again in this story. The narrator is unable to describe what a cathedral looks like to the blind man using words. As another way of communicating the image, the narrator and the blind man draw a cathedral together. Unlike the physical intimacy of the first story, this actually does seem like it’s at least somewhat successful. The blind man gets excited, and while drawing with his eyes closed, the narrator explains, “I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.” Perhaps not using language is a freeing sensation as he is truly able to connect with another person.
The stories can be discussed in terms of the themes of isolation, communication, and transcendence. In “Cathedral,” the protagonist is unable to feel in a genuine way: he is distant from his wife, and he’s unsure how to act when the blind man comes to visit. As a result, he is isolated. Similarly, the couples in “What We Talk About” do not allow themselves to (or are unable to) feel, which is why they drink excessively. Laura and Nick (the narrator) say they love each other, and they touch each other throughout the conversation to reassure each other they do, but the fact is they need gin to hold their lives together. As that story comes to a close, the conversation ends because the gin runs out. Laura says “I don’t think I’ve ever been so hungry in my life,” and she is as hungry for human connection as she is for food. The room goes dark, and that, together with the absence of gin, signifies the isolation of each the friends around the table. Nick says he “could hear [his] heart beating” and “the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving.” He senses their desperate humanity in the dark. In “Cathedral,” when the narrator closes his eyes and holds the hand of the blind man to draw a cathedral, he loses sense of place altogether: “I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything at all.” Like Nick, he senses something profound and sacred about the experience of isolation