Carver’s short story “Cathedral” Reminds me a lot of Ethan Frome. Specifically, I was reminded of Wharton’s attribution of a substantial amount of sexual tension in a red jelly dish that eventually ended up breaking. Similarly, Carver’s inclusion of the strawberry pie— and eating in general— throughout the story facilitated the maintenance of the narrator’s aggression towards the Robert. As the narrator continually offers and re-offers the strawberry pie to Robert as the night dwindles on, this seems to be a way in which the narrator grounds himself and reinforces his role as host, house-owner, and husband. As the reader, I wish the narrator would just forget about it. I thought to myself “ For the love of God, the man knows there’s more strawberry pie lets get on with it”. In this moment I realized it was also a relatively useful pacing tool, although as a reader held in the suspense of Carver’s extraordinary ordinary scenario— I was not particularly enthused by it. This of course, made me like it that much more. Which is perhaps the hypocrisy and irony that Carver was trying to simulate through the strawberry pie. The strawberry pie delivered a concomitant feeling of nostalgia and annoyance. I thought both of my grandmother and carrying thanksgiving leftovers up three flights of stairs. I digress. The original narration if eating also managed to equalize the three characters, who, prior to the meal, could not have seemed to have more different needs. The blind man needed company, the wife needed someone to care and give her attention, and the narrator needed to repair his ego. All three of them needed to eat. And perhaps this was a necessary plot point that led to the reader being shown how to see by Robert— someone whom he had resigned to be less capable. And more importantly, a necessary progression towards the final climactic plot point of cathedral drawing on the last page.
