(10 min. ~1400 wds)

Raymond Carver influenced my writing way back in undergrad. His blue-collar, American themes reflected my upbringing in a Midwestern industrial city. Added to this is his style, a terse, minimalist prose that empowers the reader to enter the story—to invest their thoughts and opinions, sometimes testing them, like he does in “Cathedral,” which uses dramatic irony to make his narrator fallible and unreliable. Carver uses the narrator’s character flaws as an unreliable narrator in a way to create a dramatic effect that employs the reader’s perceptions about morals and propriety.

The story of “Cathedral” is about a brief visit from the narrator’s wife’s longtime friend, an elderly blind man who recently lost his wife. In the opening paragraph, the narrator let’s the reader in on his thoughts, “And his being blind bothered me. My idea of blindness came from the movies.” Almost immediately, the narrator in “Cathedral” shows his ignorance and myopic opinions to the reader early in the story and never breaks character. Best of all, he is a character in his own story, one that is often bigoted and vulgar toward others. What he sees and thinks cannot be reliable for the telling of this story.

From the beginning of the story, we can see the narrator’s insensitive opinions. And it’s only one of many ignorant statements littering the story. The reader quickly sheds any sympathy for this narrator, because the reader knows more than the narrator. According to Wayne Booth in “The Rhetoric of Fiction,” if a narrator depicts facts and opinions that do not coincide with those of the other characters or commonly held beliefs or theories of the time, then the narrator is no longer a reliable source, because their perspective is skewed to the point of being misleading. The following excerpt from “The Rhetoric of Fiction” explains this very well:

 

When the novelist chooses to deliver his facts and summaries as though the mind of one of his characters, he is in danger of surrendering precisely “that liberty of transcending the limits of the immediate scene” – particularly the limits of that character he has chosen as his mouthpiece… it is enough to say that a fact, when it has been given to us by the author or his unequivocal spokesperson, is a very different thing from the same “fact” given to us by a fallible character in the story (Booth, p. 174).

This follows Henry James’ insights on dramatic narration through a narrator who is a character in the story. James concluded that because the narrator is a character they are fallible, and this fallibility questions the reliability of the narrator’s perceptions about the story, social constructs, and many other issues surrounding the narrative. A good example of this would be having a Flat Earther tell a story about scientific discovery and fact.

There are many instances where Carver’s narrator shows his ignorance. One place in particular is where he describes the blind man’s dead wife, and criticizes her name, “Beulah! That’s a name for a colored woman.” His use of the word “colored” construct the mentality of a person stuck in the 60s, before the civil rights movement, and proves his ignorance. The narrator is a bigot.

Later in the story, the narrator offers no condolences or sympathy for the blind man’s loss of his wife, who had recently passed away. Upon meeting the blind man for the first time, the narrator describes the blind man’s physical disability:

“But he didn’t use a cane and he didn’t wear dark glasses. I’d always thought dark glasses were a must for the blind… Too much white in the iris, for one thing, and the pupils seemed to move around in the sockets without his knowing it or being able to stop it. Creepy.”

Why would glasses be “a must” for someone that is blind? He regards the disability as a defect, making him “Creepy,” something unapproachable, not human, a freak. Carver’s narrator is an immature man, an ignorant man, his juvenile sensibilities incapable to understand the world around him.

Then, this jerk of a narrator describes his wife’s attempted suicide in a perfunctory manner: “But instead of dying, she got sick. She threw up.” His thoughts are ambivalent and without compassion. No love or sympathy about her depression, and subsequent cry for help.

His wife and the blind man exchanged voice recordings for many years. She became a good friend when she was a caretaker and assistant. The narrator recalls listening for the first time to one of the blind man’s recordings. They are interrupted at the critical moment when the blind man was about to offer his opinion of her husband, the narrator, who thinks, “Maybe it was just as well. I’d heard all I wanted to.” He doesn’t care about what others feel or think. Lacking empathy for others, the reader can continue to disregard any feelings they may have toward the narrator.

The final scene in “Cathedral” has the blind man together with the narrator, watching TV, sharing beers and pot. The blind man wanted to know what the cathedral looked like on TV and the only way was through the narrator drawing one for him. They hold hands while working together to draw a cathedral on paper. “It was like nothing else in my life up to now,” explains the narrator. The reader feels this may be a poignant transformation for the narrator, because he is starting to understand what it is like to be blind. He is finally walking in someone else’s shoes. Yet, I would argue that Carver maintains his narrator’s inability to understand what it is like to be blind in the penultimate sentence: “But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.” In the end, the reader understands more about the narrator and the environment surrounding him, than the narrator can comprehend. We want the narrator to change, but he doesn’t; he is incapable of change and remains as closed-minded as he was in the first paragraph. The shock and surprise comes from within the reader, not the character—a type of person already known for his ignorance and unreliable insights. In the end, Carver is looking at you, and asks What did you expect about this guy? That he would change? Now, that’s just impossible. Carver intended to build dramatic irony through his narrator’s ignorance, which according to Booth he becomes unreliable, because his facts don’t jive with the other characters and the reader’s preconceived notions. This is a skillfully used effect to create dramatic irony for the purpose of that famous final scene at the end of the story.

Quotes pulled from Raymond Carver’s short story collection “Where I’m Calling From” published by Vintage Contemporaries, 1989.