Raymond
Carver said it was possible 'to write about commonplace things and
objects using commonplace but precise language and endow these things - a
chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring - with
immense, even startling power'. Nowhere is this alchemy more striking
than in the title story of Cathedral in which a blind man guides the
hand of a sighted man as together they draw the cathedral the blind man
can never see. Many view this story, and indeed this collection, as a
watershed in the maturing of Carver's work to a more confidently poetic
style.