Ben Wever’s focus on “Cathedral” as a crucible of how people learn is illuminating. This was my second reading of Carver’s famous short story, and I approached it in view of insights gleaned from our assigned article on “Helping Students Read Difficult Texts.” That is, I tried to take the time to read the story more deeply than I had initially done several years ago and to extract more meaningful connections.

The first time I read “Cathedral,” I absorbed the sheer immediacy of the narrative, immersing myself in the ambiance of marital tensions, an imagined blue collar cage of a home with alcohol, pot and a TV blaring, and the strange insertion of a blind man into a scene of commonplace domesticity. Racing through the story within my own limited frame of reference for its entertainment value, I suppose I was fishing in shallow waters, as the article describes.

This time I asked myself, “How would I try to teach ‘Cathedral’ to a class?” How did Carver achieve his vision? As a teacher, certainly I would need to fish in deeper waters myself in order to encourage others to embrace the challenge. This time as I read and reread segments of the story, I better appreciated how the rough, casual first-person narration was deceptively simple and subtly revealing. The narrator skims over his wife’s history, including her suicide attempt. His easy flow of words betrays the confines of their lives and as Ben Wever notes, the narrator’s own underlying insecurities. I would challenge a class to highlight some of the lines that they found most revealing. What does the dialogue tell us? I found the blind man’s repeated use of the word “bub” to be brilliant. I heard and saw him as a fellow in his own right. How else did the author make the characters come alive?

We know the blind man Robert from his gestures of fierce self-reliance, such as his operation of a ham radio that puts him in touch with the world, an incongruous preference for the color TV in his home, his ravenous eating, drinking and smoking, and his zest for a strawberry pie that he identifies by taste at dinner. The details are polished gems. Robert knows exactly how to break through the narrator’s defenses and to enlist his friendship; a connection is created. The wife who brings the two disparate men together becomes almost irrelevant, as she passes out between them on the sofa in her pink slippers and pink robe, which parts at the fold. The story is uncannily provocative.

It would be exciting to steer a class toward examining the elements of style, language and timeless thematic and psychological meaning that Carver achieves with such engaging simplicity. Reading closely and analytically is indeed an essential skill to derive meaning from serious texts. It is so worthwhile to try to exercise this broadly applicable skill and open the path for others to practice it, in my opinion.