Clifford Garstang wrote two of the best books I read last year (links at the end of this post) and I am happy to host his contribution to the discussion of Carver’s classic story, Cathedral. * * * There are two aspects of Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” that I always raise in a discussion with students. The more important of these is the voice of the narrator, but it also strikes me that the characters’ names are also significant. We see just three characters in the story: the h

I was writing a brief critique this week, and as I wrote something like, “You’ve done a nice job of telling this tale,” my itchy s-finger slipped in an extra letter so what I typed was, “You’ve done a nice job telling this stale.” It occurred to me that there is a fine line between telling a tale and telling something that is stale. <img class="size-full wp-image-1072 lazyload" title="large__7421877368" src="https://ericswyatt.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/large__7421877368.jpg