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Situational Irony
Style
Explanation and Analysis:
Carver’s writing style in “Cathedral” is conversational and minimalist. These elements of his style come across in the following passage (in which the narrator shares backstory about his wife’s relationship with Robert):
So okay. I’m saying that at the end of the summer she let the blind man run his hands over her face, said goodbye to him, married her childhood etc., who was now a commissioned officer, and she moved away from Seattle. But they’d kept in touch, she and the blind man. She made the first contact after a year or so. She called him up one night from an Air Force base in Alabama. She wanted to talk. They talked. He asked her to send him a tape and tell him about her life. She did this. She sent the tape.
The conversational quality of Carver’s style is exemplified in sentences like “So okay,” and phrases like, “I’m saying that,” both of which capture the ways that someone would actually speak. The informal, conversational nature of the first-person narration also comes across in the narrator’s use of the phrase “childhood etc.”—his way of avoiding using the phrase “childhood sweetheart” (signaling his jealousy around his wife’s first husband).
This passage also showcases Carver’s minimalist style. While some of his sentences are more complex, many of them are short and concise, describing simple actions of a specific subject, such as: “She wanted to talk,” “They talked,” “She did this,” and “She sent the tape.” Minimalist declarative sentences like this capture the narrator’s disaffected and bitter nature. As becomes clear over the course of the story, the narrator has no friends, smokes marijuana every night just to be able to fall asleep, is jealous of his wife’s other relationships, and does not feel close to her. These short and curt sentences capture his isolated and unhappy character.
Related Themes:
