Eating Disorders: Cathedral Carver

Friday 9 November 2012

Cathedral Carver

Raymond Carver was born in 1938 in the small town of Clatskanie, Oregon, to an alcoholic father who worked at a sawmill and a mother who worked as a waitress. He grew up in Washington state and married Maryann Burke, his high school girlfriend, when he was just eighteen. He and Maryann had two children by the time Carver was twenty-one. After high school, Carver and his family moved to California, where he worked a variety of odd jobs. He didn’t resume his schooling until 1958, when he began taking classes at Chico State College. While there, he took writing classes with the writer John Gardner, who introduced him to the world of writing. “Cathedral” opens with the narrator telling the reader in a conversational tone that a blind friend of his wife’s is coming to visit them. The narrator is clearly unhappy about the upcoming visit. He then flashes back to the story of how his wife met the blind man when she worked for him as a reader. At the time, she was engaged to marry an officer in the Air Force. When she tells the blind man goodbye, he asks if he can touch her face. The touch of his fingers on her face is a pivotal moment in her life, something the narrator does not understand.