What is Cathedral About and Why Should I Care? He received lots of other honors, fellowships, and awards, which you can read all about in this excellent chronology. In 1983 he became the first winner of Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award, and in 1984 he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His body of work isn't massive, but he did receive lots of recognition when he was alive. was a larger, grander story than anything had previously written" ( source).Ĭarver died at the age of fifty, in 1988, just a few years after publishing his short story collection Cathedral. In an interview, Carver said that "Cathedral," one of his favorite stories, "was very much an 'opening up' process for in every sense.
Kirk Nesset describes "Cathedral" as "a light note amid a tide of darker ones" ( source). Beneath the surface it's a story about three people who need each other badly, and manage to connect.Ĭritics and Carver himself see the story as a turning point in his writing because of its happy, hopeful ending.
On the surface, "Cathedral" is a story about a dissatisfied man whose encounter with his wife's blind friend teaches him new ways of seeing. Carver, often compared to Ernest Hemingway, is known for his bleak and stark portrayals of working-class people trapped in states of isolation. We are relying on that version for this guide. A somewhat revised version is the last story in Carver's 1983 collection of the same name. It was first published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1981. " Cathedral" is American writer and poet Raymond Carver's most famous story.
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