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Authors
Raymond Carver (b. 1938)
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Principal collections of Carver’s extensive short fiction are Put Yourself in My Shoes (1974), Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976), Furious Seasons (1977), What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), The Pheasant (1982), Cathedral (1983), and Where I’m Calling From (1988). Fires (1983) is a sampling of essays, poems, and narratives. Carver’s uncollected work has been edited by William L. Stull as No Heroics, Please (1991), expanded as Call If You Need Me (2000). Throughout his career Carver published poetry as well, the bulk of which appears in several volumes from Near Klamath (1968) to A New Path to the Waterfall (1989); All of Us (1998) collects all his poems. Arthur M. Saltzman’s Understanding Raymond Carver (1988) looks beyond the author’s apparent realism, as does Randolph Runyon’s Reading Raymond Carver (1992). Carver’s return to traditionalism is celebrated by Kirk Nesset in The Stories of Raymond Carver (1995). Sam Halpert sifts through comments by Carver’s associates in Raymond Carver: An Oral Biography (1995).
Raymond Carver received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop; at the time of his death, his realist style of short story had become the standard taught in universities across the country. Carver was a recovering alcoholic who had worked as a manual laborer before he pursued a career in writing. Alcohol and working-class characters dominate his stories, causing fellow writer John Barth to describe Carver's style as "Post-Alcoholic Blue-Collar Minimalist Hyperrealism." Carver's brand of fiction flourished in the 1980s, with Carver and other writers such as Bobbie Ann Mason, Ann Beattie, and Barry Hannah at the forefront of the movement. Among Carver's story collections are Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976), What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), and Cathedral (1983).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
When he died in 1988, Carver's work was widely admired and imitated in many literary circles. However, if we think of Carver as a refuser of typical narrative conventions and a practitioner of a "stripped-down," minimalist sort of realism, we may wonder what is left. As a story, Cathedral (1983) is austere enough -- a brief account of three people talking, and then two. None of them says anything extraordinary. Very little happens. How, then, does this story affirm imaginative engagement with the world?
1. Early in Cathedral, our narrator's wife plays a tape for her husband of a conversation between herself and the blind man. The narrator doesn't hear how the conversation concludes. Why might this scene be included in the story? What suspense or expectations does it establish?
2. The story includes several moments in which either the blind man or the narrator comments on the assumption which we usually and thoughtlessly make, that seeing the world is the same as knowing the world. Before the two men draw the cathedral together, how is this assumption disturbed in their conversation?
3. At the end of the story, the blind man tells the narrator to open his eyes, but for a moment longer he keeps them closed. Why does he do this? Does his final comment, "It's really something," provide a sufficient ending to the story?
