"Inside anything": the Evacuation of Commodified Space in Raymond Carver’s "Cathedral"

This essay examines Carver’s minimalist style as a response to postmodern culture. Taylor Johnston suggests that Carver’s spare prose has the effect of stripping away as many consumer artifacts as possible without jettisoning referentiality entirely. In this way, Carver’s stories clear the overpopulated, decorative space of both consumer culture and more canonical postmodern literatures. “Cathedral” exemplifies this operation in that it not only prunes brand names, but also
llegorizes the utopian possibility of experience removed from commodification. The essay performs a close reading of this story in which blindness becomes a figure for the evacuation of consumer culture from lower-middle-class space.