Raymond Carver!

Please read Raymond Carver's "Little Things", which is posted here:
http://www.wsfcs.k12.nc.us/cms/lib/NC01001395/Centricity/Domain/796/little_things.pdf

 We will have a group discussion when you are done.

Here is another!

"Cathedral"
http://www.misanthropytoday.com/cathedral-by-raymond-carver-weekend-short-story/

1. What is the irony of using a blind character in the story as a way of developing one of its major themes? See part where the narrator recounts the blind man burying his wife and how “he had never seen her.” Who’s really blind?

2. Explain the title. A Cathedral is where miracles happen. The miracle is that a dead man will be resurrected. The dead man is equated with the image of skeletons that occur later in the story during the TV show. Clearly, the narrator is dead and reborn by the story’s end.

3. How does the narrator reveals himself in the first paragraph? He’s a defensive ignoramus and a man so isolated from the complexity of the human condition that he is a walking corpse. He’s a dead man. Later we find that he’s friendless. His wife says he has no friends. He lives inside himself, a prisoner of his own solipsism, which is fueled in part by fear.

4. What is foreshadowed in the second paragraph? Robert’s sensitivity, tracing the wife’s face, will be passed on to the narrator at the story’s end.

5. What is the narrator’s real source of jealousy? Dead people don’t like to see people living life fully. They want everyone to be as dead and miserable as they are. The narrator resents the blind man for living life fully.

6. What do we know about the narrator’s habits? They’re reductionary. He does the same rituals over and over to close himself from emotion.  The TV watching, the fear of silence, the fear of conversation, insomnia, the depression, the smoking dope until he can crash in bed. The blind man represents change, a threat, an interference with his routine. Our routines comfort us, but they also imprison and eventually kill us.

7. What is the story’s turning point? Where Robert apologizes for monopolizing the talk with the wife. He shows empathy, something the narrator is lacking. He shows he has this quality, empathy, which evinces Robert’s maturity and gives him the credentials to be trusted as a parent figure for the narrator who is essentially a frightened child. Once that dynamic is established, the miracle can begin.

8. What contradiction about maturity do we learn in the story? The adult is relaxed enough to be a child and possess a child’s hunger to learn new things. We see this on page 397 when they’re watching TV. One of life’s contradictions is that we have to be mature enough to be children, to be relaxed enough to let go and let our child explore.

9. How do we know the narrator is a scared little kid emotionally? He keeps saying, “I’m not doing so well, am I?” He needs an adult’s approval.

10. How does the narrator change at the end of the story? In the beginning he is disaffected. By the end, gets excited, his legs become numb, he’s possessed with a sense of urgency and life purpose. He says at one point, “It was like nothing else in my life up to now.”