For most authors, it is traditional to develop some sort of writing style, which they use to write their works. Raymond Carver is an author of xmany short stories. In “A Small, Good Thing,” two parents order a birthday cake for their son who gets into a car accident the same day. In “Cathedral,” the narrator’s wife invites a friend over. This friend who is a man happens to be blind and the narrator is rather skeptical of him and his handicap. In “Preservation,” a man loses his job and his wife finds that their refrigerator has stopped working. All of these stories are about ordinary lives and Carver puts these lives through quiet drama. He uses a rather monotonous writing style to reveal this drama, which makes Carver’s stories so interesting.

In “A Small, Good Thing,” Carver takes the quiet life of a family and instantly starts drama by putting the family through life changing trials. Carver starts the story off with a very positive and easy-going mood. He puts the reader in a really vulnerable position where they wouldn’t expect anything bad to happen. In the story, Ann Weiss decides to order a birthday cake from a baker for their son Scotty’

In “Cathedral,” Carver creates an encounter between two very different people which starts drama. The narrator’s wife has a past and is very good friends with a blind man named Robert. She invites him over to her house. The narrator is not comfortable with this however. He says that his being blind bothers him. He is very insensitive about what he says about Robert. Then the narrator starts making jokes about him. This annoys his wife but she doesn’t do much about it. The narrator displays how immature and stereotypical he is about people with disabilities such as being blind. When he arrives they make him feel very comfortable. What a blind man should look like in the narrator’s eyes is not what Robert appeared to be. Throughout the evening the three of them converse over dinner. Eventually the narrator’s wife goes to sleep so the two men are stuck with each other. The turn on the TV and a show about cathedrals is on. They decide to draw a cathedral together. Then the narrator closes his eyes to perceive the world as a blind man such as Robert perceives it. He then starts to understand the disability he has. This causes the narrator to look at how he used to perceive blind men and how he used to make unfair judgments about them. He reveals that his view of blind people came from movies. He now realizes that what he knew wasn’t exactly true and that he was blind to what blind people are really like. Carver effectively displayed drama through the meeting of two normal, yet totally different people in which one of them didn’t understand the other.

Raymond Carver has become a very famous author of short stories. His technique of writing short stories by creating drama from normal situations with ordinary people using simple language has captivated many readers. The realism his stories portray

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