264 Carver, Raymond
some relief from their otherwise stultifying and stale
lives. Carver himself, whose fiction was viewed as the
near-perfect embodiment of minimalism, disliked
the term minimalist because to him it suggested a
smallness of vision, a diminishment of his characters’
experiences. But both the critics and Carver recog-
nized “Cathedral” as a breakthrough; in this story,
the otherwise typical Carver narrator makes contact
with a spiritual dimension that enlarges his world
and his vision, if only for a moment.
The narrator is the only character in this story
who, until the very last moments of “Cathedral,”
shows no interest whatsoever in transcending his
everyday life. Robert, the blind man who will lead
the narrator to his epiphany, is characterized by his
devotion to others: he works in “the county social-
service department”; in his hobby as a ham radio
operator, he cultivates connections among others;
and through his taped correspondences, Robert acts
as the narrator’s wife’s lifeline to a larger, emotionally
receptive world. In her first marriage, the narrator’s
wife had experienced a spiritual crisis that reached
its explosive expression in her unsuccessful suicide
attempt. In her second marriage, the narrator’s wife
attempts to find deeper meaning in her life through
her poetry, which she composes “after something
really important [has] happened to her.” Both
Robert and the narrator’s wife express and enact a
longing for contact with the greater world, and their
search for deeper meaning in their lives could be
read as evidence of a spiritual quest.
The narrator, on the other hand, shows only a
desire to escape his life by retreating further into his
own deeply entrenched alienation. He soaks himself
in Scotch (drinking is, he admits, one of his hobbies)
and shrouds himself in a haze of marijuana smoke in
order to insulate himself from contact with his wife,
Robert, or anyone else who might bump up against
his life. While it may seem that the substances in the
narrator’s life could act as social lubricants, instead
they serve to reinforce a wall between himself and
the larger world. If alcohol and pot facilitate con-
versation rather than impede it, the narrator turns
on the television as a way to erect a second barrier
between himself and others.
Although the narrator evinces no clear desire
to experience anything other than his life as it is,
Carver does subtly suggest that the narrator occa-
sionally recognizes, or at least feels, his own spiritual
emptiness. When the three characters sit down to
eat dinner, the narrator, to his wife’s shock, delivers
a mock prayer over the food: “Now let us pray....
Pray the phone won’t ring and the food doesn’t get
cold.” But immediately after this glib moment, the
narrator and his companions eat so voraciously as
to suggest that their hunger is not just physical but
perhaps indicative of a deeper, spiritual hunger. The
hunger reveals itself as specifically spiritual when
the narrator and Robert find themselves alone after
dinner.
When the narrator’s usual barriers (alcohol,
television) fail him, he is able for the first time in
the story to make physical, emotional, and spiritual
contact with another person. Right before his epiph-
anic moment, the narrator reaches for his drink, only
to find it empty; when he turns on the television,
the only program on (one about cathedrals) does
not distract the two men but instead draws them
into a conversation that delves into the spiritual
realm they have so far avoided. The narrator briefly
but significantly confesses his loneliness to Robert
and reveals to the reader that he is terrified by the
emptiness that confronts him at night. Later, when
the television program inspires Robert to pointedly
ask the narrator if he is religious, the narrator does
not embrace his unbelief but instead expresses sor-
row and uncertainty: “I guess I don’t believe in it. In
anything. Sometimes it’s hard. You know what I’m
saying?” The television program introduces the spir-
itual into the conversation and ushers into the nar-
rative an event that grants the narrator a profound
moment of transcendence. In the closing moments
of the story, the narrator is no longer disgusted by
Robert’s blindness; he instead reacts to Robert with
empathy, and Robert and the narrator attempt to
occupy the same world in a moment of spiritual
enlargement when they draw a cathedral together.
We must pay attention to the subject of the
television show and to the drawing. Carver could
have had the men draw anything together (a dog,
a lamp, a skyscraper); in choosing a cathedral, a site
of worship that is built by and for a community, he
deliberately draws attention to the spiritual aspect of
communion that the men experience. In the process