Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" and "Careful" Term Paper

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"I can hear you...I'm alright," he says, but at the end of the story he resumes his drinking again (Carver, 1989, p.274).

The significance of physicality in both stories is noteworthy, as it seems to reflect a distrust of language, rather than an embrace of language, as the characters communicate primarily though touching. Carver's prose has often been called minimalistic, a charge that he resisted. Yet Inez and Lloyd do not connect when they go for marital counseling, they do connect, if only briefly, when Inez must clean Lloyd's ears. The only time Lloyd can really hear is when his wife tries to reach him through physical rather than verbal gestures. The husband of "Cathedral" rages against blindness, but enters the blind man's world through the medium of touch, even after he has tried to exclude the blind man by turning on the TV.

What is particularly important for an analysis of Carver's narrative style is Hassan's description of the "anti-languages" silence in the story creates (Trussler, 1994, p.2).

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Carver uses ordinary discourse to create "an internal distance, a displacement, that severs the text from the character/narrators who give it enunciation," in other words, the characters often speak most when they are simply silent and engaged in physical action, rather than talking (Trussler, 1994, p.4). Through an acknowledgement of physical vulnerability, often male physical vulnerability, Carver's characters can communicate. Communication is possible, but not through words, and bringing this element of real, lived physical existence into his text is perhaps the most realistic and significant aspect of Carver's works, far more than his use of humble details about the character's lives and class status within America.

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