Situational Irony In Cathedral By Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver, “Cathedral”. Carver’s main character is a man who reluctantly welcomes a blind visitor in his house. The character doesn’t want to meet him, but he is forced into hospitality because his wife has demanded he be courteous as proof of his love to her. Love motivates the husband to do something bold. Love is blind, sometimes causing crucial life-changing actions.

The renowned author, Raymond Carver, utilizes dramatic and situational irony throughout his short stories, Cathedral, Neighbors, and They’re not your husband. Carver is well known for using different types of irony to allure the reader. In Cathedral, and They 're not your husband situational irony is amply evident. Situational irony is when the opposite of what is expected to happen, occurs. However, in Neighbors, dramatic irony is prevalent.

With this, readers could sense that the narrator is jealous, grouchy, and angry that Robert’s presence affects the narrator’s wife because of the connection between both the wife and Robert. The author prepares readers for the enlightenment when Robert came for a visit and that is how cathedral came about. The narrator explains, “The TV showed this one cathedral” (110). In this scene, the narrator and Robert bonded about the appearance of the cathedral. Instantly, the narrator says to Robert, “Do you have any idea what a cathedral is?

Cathedral” by Raymond Carver, Raymond Carver use point of view effectively and demonstrates symbolism. The story begins with the blind man. He is visiting an old friend and her husband after his wife recently died. The story is told from the husband’s point of view. The story being told from the husband’s point of view is important.

A late-night program about cathedrals is on. The narrator, realizing Robert cannot see the pictures of cathedrals on the screen attempts to describe what a cathedral looks like. However, he finds himself unable to find the words to properly describe one, so Robert suggests drawing one together, and by sharing this experience with Robert, the narrator finally understands Robert’s world and how it is not much different than his own. Through this story, Carver uses humor to show the character traits of the narrator and enhance his relationship with his other wife and Robert, and by doing this creates more realistic, in-depth character. At the beginning of this short story, the narrator introduces his relationship with his wife, her relationship with Robert, and their backstory.

The epic poem Omeros by Derek Walcott is written in non-rhyming, non-metrical tercets. However, the third canto in Chapter XXXIII deviates from this structure and takes the shape of a smaller poem comprised of 17 rhyming couplets. The diction in this section creates an ominous tone, that is emphasized by the metrical cadence, to highlight the narrator’s feelings of loneliness and grief being alone in the house he once shared with his lost lover. The regularity and rhythm created by the rhyming couplets in this canto illustrate the narrator’s attempt to make sense of and come to terms with the emotions that have manifested within the house. In the previous cantos of this chapter, the narrator describes his life living alone in Brookline, Massachusetts as he laments his old love.

. In “Ok So I’m Fat” Neil Steinberg states that people make many implicit comments when people like him, who don’t have a perfect body, are near. When Steinberg went to a party the hostess wasn’t eating dessert, because she knew it had too much sugar. It is worrisome when people stop caring about their weight because they might have some health complications. It’s sad to know that society has criticized fat people to the point they feel bad just by looking at skinnier people than them.

In Beowulf, it says “their ears could not hear his praise nor know his glory,” this is a connection to God in this epic, but in modern society, people with anxiety don’t hear praise they receive from others because they don’t believe it (lines 97-98). Grendel can’t help who his ancestors are, but he can help himself instead of living down to their expectations. In The Monster Called Anxiety, it says “The inside of my head is a loud place. Something is constantly bouncing around. I think about things I said or did years ago, about how ‘stupid’ I was,/ Anxiety makes me a difficult person to be friends with” (Ann).

Stanley, Stella’s husband, was not fond of Blanche. Because of this he hires someone to look into her past to see if she was who she was saying she was. While doing so Stanley encounters the ugly truth about Blanche’s past which she had been trying so hard to hide from her sister and Mitch, a man she was seeing and hoping to get married to. Never the less when Stanley exposed who she really was to Mitch he found her unfit and too filthy to introduce to his mother so he ended things. All of that was not enough for Stanley; he wanted Blanche gone so he bought her a bus ticket for her birthday.

He is the master of American horror yet with close examination he writing style is not so different from Wilde’s, just like Wilde he was partial to using aestheticism, his writing style is so often referred to his ‘addiction to adjectives’. Interestingly for Poe unlike so many of his contemporise, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson he wasn’t a ‘great American dream story writer’, whereas Emerson belonged to the mainstream national narrative, who saw American as new, full of potential and belonged to the transcendentalist movement, Poe illustrated America through a counter narrative. Emerson’s American offered hope, while Poe’s America offered death, decay and despair, not a new land but a decaying one; if Emerson looked outwards Poe most certainly looked inward. Poe’s narrative style can be seen as the great narrative of death and decay in America, but it is essential to examine why? Firstly modern readers can assume that a primary reason for Poe’s obsession with all things dead and decaying was because Poe suffered great death and loss in his life, described by Killis Campbell as “the saddest and strangest figure in American literary history”.