Then I came back to ‘Cathedral’ and read it over and over, just like Poppy listens to that CD. I mourned the fact that he was already dead and I would never get to meet him. I went on and read every other Carver story I could find. Joyce called it the epiphany, for Woolf it was a moment of being. When I first read Carver’s story ‘Cathedral’, I had that moment too. She clearly had a moment, while watching that movie, that made her believe this was one of the best stories ever. When she first saw Coraline, she watched it about four times in the same week. One might even say she’s a little bit obsessed. She does this almost every night at the minute. And she takes a couple of soft toys to bed and has them act out parts of the story to the music. Not just the pretty bits but the whole thing, including the strange parts. As I write this, I am listening to my six-year-old daughter Poppy while she pretends to go to sleep listening to the soundtrack from the Coraline movie. This is Raymond Carver and he is referring to his story ‘Cathedral’. While we may not have these exact prejudices, we have others, and it’s not at all difficult to relate to the husband.“I knew that story was different from anything I’d ever written… and all of the stories after that seemed to be fuller somehow and much more generous and maybe more affirmative… Somehow I had found another direction I wanted to move toward. After all, the husband’s prejudices about blind people-they all wear dark glasses, they don’t have beards, they don’t smoke, etc.-are human attributes. While the named people represent something foreign, the unnamed may merely be stand-ins for all of us. But there’s another aspect to the namelessness of husband and wife.
And Robert needs to have a name for the husband, but instead calls him “Bub,” no name at all, even though on two occasions the husband listens for Robert to use his name.
The people who are very familiar to him-himself, his wife, even his wife’s first husband-are unnamed, but these strangers coming into his life, Robert and Beulah, have to be named. In fact, he thinks the name “Beaulah” sounds like a black name, and his image of Robert’s wife as possibly being black contributes to their otherness for him. Robert and Beaulah, however, are unknown to the husband, and so their names are more a part of his impression of them.
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