Back to the sofa, Robert and the narrator’s wife talk about the last ten years. When Robert comes, they drink whiskey and eat a large dinner. The narrator goes on to tell us that his wife worked for the blind man, Robert, one summer, reading to him and that she kept in touch through sending tapes. “This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to spend the night.” Sometimes the best things are written quickly. I wonder if Carver had to rush to finish it before he reached his stop.
I analysed ‘Cathedral’ with them, and these are some of the things we talked about.įirstly, I read somewhere that this story was written on a train.
Why is it so good, I thought? Later, I chose Carver as a key text in a course I taught to English undergraduates. Then I came back to ‘Cathedral’ and read it over and over, just like Poppy listens to that CD. I mourned the fact that he was already dead and I would never get to meet him. I went on and read every other Carver story I could find. Joyce called it the epiphany, for Woolf it was a moment of being. When I first read Carver’s story ‘Cathedral’, I had that moment too. She clearly had a moment, while watching that movie, that made her believe this was one of the best stories ever. When she first saw Coraline, she watched it about four times in the same week.
One might even say she’s a little bit obsessed. She does this almost every night at the minute. And she takes a couple of soft toys to bed and has them act out parts of the story to the music. Not just the pretty bits but the whole thing, including the strange parts. As I write this, I am listening to my six-year-old daughter Poppy while she pretends to go to sleep listening to the soundtrack from the Coraline movie. This is Raymond Carver and he is referring to his story ‘Cathedral’.
“I knew that story was different from anything I’d ever written… and all of the stories after that seemed to be fuller somehow and much more generous and maybe more affirmative… Somehow I had found another direction I wanted to move toward.
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