Carver, "Cathedral"

Despite its prominent placement in the title of the story, the cathedral in Raymond Carver's short story "Cathedral" takes quite a while to make its appearance. The story instead is about a marriage -- a husband and wife have a guest to dinner. Carver's story is narrated in the first person, from the perspective of the husband, so to some extent the symbolism of the story is constructed with a sort of irony: the narrator himself is not explicitly aware of the symbolism, nor does he comment upon it directly. As a result, the relationship of the central symbol of the story is more or less oblique: its significance is signposted by the story's title, but is otherwise withheld from the reader for what seems a very long time until it makes its appearance. However, I hope that, with some close reading of the story as a whole,...
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