on a quest that will bestow a greater sense of com-
munity on all of the characters in “Cathedral.”
Raymond Carver expresses perhaps the most
poignant and moving expression of a need for com-
munity through the figure of the narrator’s wife.
Throughout her life, the wife has experienced a
profound feeling of disconnection and a strong
desire to find a larger community to join. In her
first marriage to an air force officer, the narrator’s
wife felt so overwhelmingly dislocated and remote
that she attempted to kill herself. We know her
suicide attempt is directly tied to her longing for
community: “[O]ne night she got to feeling lonely
and cut off from people she kept losing in that
moving-around life. She got to feeling she couldn’t
go another step. She went in and swallowed all the
pills and capsules in the medicine chest and washed
them down with a bottle of gin.” The narrator’s
wife survives her suicide attempt and a subsequent
divorce only to find herself married to a man, the
narrator, who seems completely committed to isolat-
ing himself from the rest of the world.
For the narrator’s wife, Robert represents, and
has represented, a lifeline to the larger world. Dur-
ing her dark days of dislocation as an officer’s wife,
one of the few constants in her life was her com-
munication with Robert (in the form of audiotapes).
Although physically distant, Robert remains emo-
tionally close to the narrator’s wife and offers her
counsel on her first marriage as well as her second.
In her second marriage (to the narrator) the wife
feels a similar sense of isolation within the bounds
of her marriage: Her husband, the narrator, has no
friends, and therefore does not enlarge their social
circle; he shows only grudging interest in her poetry;
the husband and wife no longer go to bed at the
same time; and, most tellingly, the narrator feels
relieved when a mundane interruption saves him
from listening to the tape on which Robert delivers
his opinion of their marriage. In the life of the nar-
rator’s wife, her second marriage is simply another
lonely episode in an existence bereft of a loving
larger community.
Robert’s appearance in the couple’s life not only
connects the wife to another person and to the out-
side world but also forces open the narrator’s barren
world and peoples it. Almost immediately upon
Robert’s appearance, the narrator stops thinking
of the three of them as separate beings and instead
describes them moving through the house as a “little
group.” Furthermore, Robert’s presence sparks the
first stirrings of empathy in the narrator. Although
the narrator retains a cruel edge (he demeans Rob-
ert’s marriage and silently refers to his loss of Beulah
as “pathetic”), when he imagines Robert’s life and
love, he identifies with another person as he seldom
has before.
The most profound yearning for and discovery
of a community comes at the end of the story, when
Robert and the narrator draw a cathedral together.
After trying to insulate himself from Robert by
drinking scotch, smoking pot, and watching televi-
sion, the narrator connects with Robert physically,
emotionally, and imaginatively in this act of creation.
In this moment, the narrator makes contact not
only with Robert but also with a larger imagined
community, and the theme of community is most
compellingly expressed in the titular symbol of the
cathedral. A cathedral is a place where the devout
congregate and pray together, and therefore it stands
as a powerful symbol of community and belief, two
things the narrator lacks. Indeed, after drawing the
cathedral with Robert, the narrator feels as if he has
been liberated; the walls of his insulated dwelling
have been knocked down, and the narrator confesses
that “I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.” This
imaginative exercise, then, has transformed the nar-
rator’s isolated, nuclear home into a new space with-
out barriers. The symbol of the cathedral becomes
doubly potent when we realize that, “[t]he building
of a cathedral, especially in the Middle Ages, was a
project in which the entire town took part.” A com-
munity is necessary to forge the physical structure
that will then, in turn, strengthen that community
and bind it to a wider world, just as Robert, in
attempting to heal his own loneliness, draws the two
separate members of this marriage into communion
with himself, each other, and the world.
Cara McClintock-Walshspirituality in “Cathedral”
Throughout his career, Raymond Carver was often
accused of denying his fictional characters contact
with a spiritual dimension that might offer them“Cathedral” 263