Characterization in Cathedral and a Small Good Thing

In “Cathedral,” Robert is blind and just lost his wife. Blindness is a common disability in the world. Carver uses a character with a disability to show the reader that he isn’t a superman, just a normal person. Robert has even learned to adapt with his misfortune. The husband and wife are also regular characters with an unhealthy marriage, using drugs and alcohol. They are on two different tracks. “Every night I smoked dope and stayed up as long as I could before I fell asleep. My wife and I hardly ever went to bed at the same time” (Carver 296). The husband also felt uncomfortable around Robert at first. The story gets to show them spending time to

Carver also likes to keep the character’s names very basic. In “Cathedral,” the reader only knows two of the main characters as the husband and the wife. Robert’s last name is never revealed either. In “A Small, Good Thing,” Carver also keeps the names very basic with Howard, Ann, Scotty and the baker. The last name of the family, Weiss, is only told once when Ann is setting up the cake with the baker. Having characters with simple names makes the reader more able to connect with them. This technique is called minimalism. “...Carver’s slices of life were far too lean when characters walked around with only first names . . . The technical spareness is frequently conflated with the material” (Skenazy 321). When people know other people, they do not call them by their full name, just their first name or a nickname. That is how the reader is supposed to feel after they have read Carver’s stories and to feel like they know the characters.

Carver thinks of the world as very normal, but also with problems. He Carver creatively writes ordinary characters. In both stories the reader can connect on many levels with the characters. Through the characters being nor

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