The very idea of his wife's reunion with the blind Robert seems to provoke in him phrases which at first glance seem like plain idiomatic speech but which may very well be more pointed: he notes that his wife 'hadn't seen' Robert in a long time but 'she and the blind man had kept in touch.' Although he resists making these jokes more obvious - to suggest that his wife hadn't seen Robert in a long time, but Robert hadn't seen her at all, or to point out that 'keeping in touch' is an appropriate idiom for a man who once groped his wife's face (and will engage the narrator in a similarly tactile encounter before the story's end) - I think the buildup in the opening is deliberate. After a few sentences sketching the basic premise of the story's plot, we are faced with details of language that beg the question of whether the narrator is being consciously witty, or merely self-conscious. The opening paragraph demonstrates that Carver's narrator may be somewhat ungracious, but he is also possessed of a mordant wit. I hope to demonstrate the ways in which Carver uses the devices of fiction within the difficult feat of allowing the protagonist to tell (if not fully comprehend) his own story. Yet Carver carefully employs the first-person perspective of the narrator to demonstrate - almost beyond his own self-awareness - to dramatize the protagonist's evolution over the course of the story.

Eventually after consuming several scotches and some 'dope you can reason with,' the wife falls asleep on the sofa leaving the protagonist in conversation with the blind Robert, eventually leading to the muted but bittersweet conclusion of the story.

The husband is resistant to the social occasion, but goes through with it - although his narration makes us privy to his thoughts (which are occasionally marked by a low-level hostility) or else offers wry and laconic descriptions of his own statements and behavior. Raymond Carver's short story 'Cathedral' is narrated in the first person by the unnamed protagonist, and tells a deceptively simple story: the narrator's wife (also unnamed) has invited her former employer Robert, an older blind man recently widowed, to come for dinner and stay the night.

Cathedral story by raymond carver