262 Carver, Raymond
the end of the summer she... married her child-
hood etc.” Similarly, the narrator reduces his wife’s
friendship with Robert to either a point of annoy-
ance or an insensitive joke. He admits that “I wasn’t
enthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew.
And his being blind bothered me,” and at one point
he jokes that perhaps he will take the blind man
bowling. The narrator even stoops to making fun of
Robert’s recently deceased wife and callously calls
their marriage “[p]athetic.” At first, it seems that
the narrator rejects Robert because Robert is blind,
but after revealing his own misanthropic tendencies
throughout the story, it seems that he rejects Robert
simply because the narrator is emotionally barren
and almost entirely incapable of relating to others.
The narrator’s sense of alienation is so pervasive
that he feels estranged not only from Robert but
also from his wife and the world in general. When
his wife offers to let the narrator listen to a tape
that Robert made about him, he reluctantly agrees.
But just as Robert is about reveal his opinion of the
narrator, “we were interrupted, a knock at the door,
something, and we didn’t ever get back to the tape.
Maybe it was just as well. I’d heard all I wanted to.”
Similarly, when given the opportunity to understand
his wife through her poetry, which is about “really
important [things that] had happened to her,” the
narrator only remarks that “I didn’t think much of
the poem.... Maybe I just don’t understand poetry.”
Not only does the narrator fail to understand poetry,
he fails to understand his wife, and he shows little
desire to do so. The undelivered message and the
barely read poem signal the narrator’s desire to
insulate himself from others, even from messages his
wife is trying to communicate to him. Even though
his wife, in her first marriage, tried to kill herself
because she felt so “lonely and cut off from people,”
the narrator of “Cathedral” seems unaware that he is
recreating for her a life of loneliness and isolation.
Although the narrator resents Robert through-
out most of the story, and although he resists a
meaningful connection with Robert by erecting bar-
riers between them in the form of television, alcohol,
and marijuana (all further symbols of the narrator’s
alienation), by the end of “Cathedral,” Robert brings
the narrator in touch, physically and emotionally,
with the world. When the narrator asks Robert if
he knows what a cathedral looks like, he expresses
his first moment of empathy, an empathy he builds
upon when he closes his eyes in an attempt to “see”
from Robert’s point of view. In his attempt to define
a cathedral for Robert, the narrator breaks through
the surface of life and delves into “the interior stuff.”
The verbal connection—the narrator describing
cathedrals to Robert—precedes the physical con-
nection between the two men. When the narrator
draws a cathedral at Robert’s behest and lets Robert
close “his hand over my hand,” he experiences a
connection with another human being that is more
than physical: It is profound and spiritual. We
understand that this connection with Robert heralds
a connection with the world in general when Robert
makes the narrator draw “some people” in the cathe-
dral because “What’s a cathedral without people?”
Through this encounter, the narrator moves from
isolation to intimacy, from nothing to something,
from total alienation to a newly populated emotional
world.
Cara McClintock-WalshcOmmunity in “Cathedral”
All three of the major characters in “Cathedral” find
themselves isolated from others and, to differing
degrees, express a longing to connect with or belong
to a larger community. Robert’s cross-country trip,
which ends with his visit to the narrator and the
narrator’s wife, illustrates his attempt to find com-
fort in the community of his in-laws and his friends
after his wife’s death leaves him in a state of sudden
isolation. Beulah, whose very name means “mar-
ried,” had been a partner to Robert in all ways: She
was his wife, his interpreter (she worked for Robert
immediately after the narrator’s wife did), and his
business partner; in short, she was his world. When
Robert and Beulah married, it was “just the two of
them,” and throughout their marriage “they had
been inseparable for eight years—my wife’s word,
inseparable.” When Robert loses the woman who
in all ways appeared to be the other half of him, he
reaches out to and travels toward two living embodi-
ments of his wife: Beulah’s family and the narrator’s
wife, whom Robert had met in the same way he met
Beulah. In his journey from the West Coast to the
East Coast, from solitude to solace, Robert embarks