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Definition of Setting
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or it can be an imagined... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the... read full definition
Setting
Explanation and Analysis:
“Cathedral” is set in a middle-class home in upstate New York, likely in the late 1970s or early 1980s (when Carver wrote the story). Though Carver does not make the setting explicit, he includes little details that point to the time and place of the story, such as the following exchange between Robert and the narrator about black-and-white versus color TVs:
The blind man said, “My dear, I have two TVs. I have a color set and a black-and-white thing, an old relic. It’s funny, but if I turn the TV on, and I’m always turning it on, I turn the color set on. Always. It’s funny.”
[…]
“This is a color TV,” the blind man said. “Don’t ask me how, but I can tell.”
“We traded up a while ago,” I said.
Carver signals that this story is set during the time period when Americans were replacing their black-and-white television sets with color ones. While some wealthy American families were able to transition to color sets in the 1960s, regular middle-class people—like the narrator, his wife, and Robert—were part of the wave of people who were only able to “trade up” when color TVs were less expensive (in the late 1970s).
This passage is notable as it is one of many in which Robert surprises the narrator with his powers of perception. Despite being blind, he owns two televisions and is able to tell the difference between the sound coming from the black-and-white TV set and the color one. It is because of Robert’s perceptiveness—to both the world around him and other people's emotional states—that the narrator eventually starts to open up to him.
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