Best of Week: Cathedral and Intimacy

This year in English we have, obviously, read many stories of all sorts. We've read Shakespeare, modern depictions of Afghanistan, and all in all a huge variety of literature. I find it awesome that, after all these things, we're finally touching on short stories. I find that short stories can be the most meaningful to read and possibly the most fun to write. They can have all of the meaning without an intimidating amount of length-- writing or reading long books can be, well, difficult.

So, our entry into the short story unit should naturally have begun with reading a short story. This week we read Raymond Carver's Cathedral and I found our discussions on it to be very interesting. The major topic that we brushed on was intimacy of all sorts present in the story. There's a whole lot of it going on, so it was somewhat of a difficult task to break it all down.

The class, I think, agreed that the most passionate form of intimacy lies between Robert, the blind man, and the narrator's wife. Between the narrator and his wife is a pretty big lack of intimacy: physical, emotional, religious, or Romantic, it's all lacking somewhat. A class example came on page 218, where the narrator's wife only mentions Robert's name and never the narrator's, though he anxiously awaits its mention. We all agreed that Carver had intentions for this, to demonstrate the void of intimacy between them. Lastly, I find it interesting that all the intimacy in the story is centered around the narrator's wife. Her ex-husband, Robert, and her current husband, all shared some form of intimacy with her.

Intimacy is present in pretty much every story every made; I can't name a single one without it. It is the thread that binds characters and people together, and without it there's really nothing for an author to work with. It's very important, especially in a short story, to establish ties between the characters whether they be physical, emotional, or social. As we write our own short stories, I think it's very important to take this all into consideration.

Without any intimacy, the entire world would just be meaningless and void of emotion. Carver's story does a great job establishing it, even with a somewhat drone and simple narrator. This goes to show that intimacy exists aside of the speaker, that like postmodern memory, it exists around us and we are part of it. Intimacy is not a choice, but rather is omnipresent and we must acknowledge this in our writing.