Raymond Carver's Sequential Vision in Cathedral

[[abstract]]Raymond Carver's Cathedral is not generally considered to be a short story sequence, yet its twelve stories' thematic preoccupation with communication-the success or failure of characters to produce meaningful dialogue and acts of collaboration-suggests an underlying sequential structure. The opening story ＂Feathers＂ introduces the volume's thematic core by establishing a potential for positive transformation through constructive communication. In some of the stories which follow (particularly ＂A Small, Good Thing,＂ ＂Where I'm Calling From,＂ and ＂Cathedral＂) this potential is realized: characters connect with each other, escape their isolation, and occasionally experience powerful moments of transcendence. In several of the volume's stories the picture is much bleaker with characters remaining alienated due to their inability, or unwillingness, to bridge the divides between them. ＂The Train,＂ in its opaque, fragmentary narrative, presents this state of alienation in a starkly distilled way. Cathedral is, up until and including the final story which lends the volume its title, deeply ambiguous is its treatment of its core issue. Indeed, its design carefully builds ambiguity into the patterning of its stories, complicating our attempts to discover thematic unity, and ultimately producing a complex sequential vision. This sequential vision is herein examined in terms of critic J. Gerald Kennedy's characterization of the short story sequence as a genre as much dependent on discontinuity between stories as upon unifying characteristics