Setting

The short story “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver takes place over the course of one evening in New York (p. 4, ll. 36-37), probably sometime in the 1970s or 1980s (the story was published in 1981).

Physical setting

The main physical setting is the narrator’s home (mostly the kitchen and the living room), but there are also references to other places such as Seattle, where the narrator’s wife met Robert, or Connecticut, where Robert buried his wife. 

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Social setting

The social setting explores aspects related to marriage and relationships, friendship, and attitudes towards people with disabilities (in this case, blind people).

The story explores marriage through the wife’s previous marriage with an Air Force officer and her current marriage to the narrator.

The narrator feels threatened by his wife’s previous marriage and focuses on its negative aspects: the constant traveling due to the husband’s job, the wife’s loneliness and depression resulting in a suicide attempt:

…she got to feeling lonely and cut off from people she kept losing in that moving-around life. She got to feeling she couldn’t go it another step. She went in and swallowed all the pills and capsules in the medicine chest and washed them down with a bottle of gin. (p. 2, ll. 15-18)

The narrator’s marriage with his wife also has its conflictual side. Their conflict is mostly caused by the narrator’s contempt for her friendship with Robert,...

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