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Raymond Carver, “Cathedral”
A. Item Identification Questions (Easy)
1. Who is Robert?
Answer: He is the narrator‟s wife‟s friend and the blind houseguest.
2. How did the narrator‟s wife know Robert?
Answer: She worked as his assistant and read books for him.
3. What did Robert and the narrator‟s wife send each other?
Answer: Tapes.
4. Who was married to an Air Force officer?
Answer: The narrator‟s wife.
5. What was Robert‟s wife‟s name?
Answer: Beulah.
6. The narrator is surprised that Robert wasn‟t wearing something. What?
Answer: Dark glasses.
7. Why isn‟t Robert‟s wife with him?
Answer: She died recently.
8. What do the three characters drink?
Answer: Scotch.
9. What do they smoke?
Answer: Marijuana.
10. What TV program do they watch?
Answer: A show on cathedrals.
11. What does the narrator try to describe for Robert?
Answer: Cathedrals.
12. When the above doesn‟t work, what does Robert suggest instead?
Answer: That he and the narrator draw a cathedral.
B. Item Identification Questions (Difficult)
1. The narrator says, “she never forgot it. She never even tried to write a poem about
it.” What did the narrator‟s wife never forget?
Answer: Robert running his fingers over her face.
2. Who says this about whom: “From all you‟ve said about him. I can only
conclude . . .”?
Answer: Robert says this about the narrator.
3. When the wife felt she “couldn‟t take another step,” what did she do?
Answer: She swallowed a lot of pills and drank a bottle of gin.
4. How did Robert meet his wife?
Answer: She worked for him.
5. What does the narrator think about a woman who could “go on day after day and
never receive the smallest compliment from her beloved”?
Answer: He tries to imagine what it would be like to be a woman married to a
blind man.
6. What did the narrator wait “in vain” to hear on his “wife‟s sweet lips”?
Answer: His name.
7. The narrator reflects, “Then something occurred to me, and I said „something has
occurred to me.‟” What occurred to him?
Answer: It occurs to him that Robert doesn‟t know what a cathedral looks like.
8. What does the narrator do with the shopping bag?
Answer: He uses it for drawing paper to draw a cathedral with Robert.
9. About what and to whom does Robert say, “Never thought anything like this
could happen in your lifetime, did you”?
Answer: He says it to the narrator about his drawing the cathedral.
10. Why does the narrator think that Robert‟s possessing a half Mexican peso is
“pathetic”?
Answer: The other half peso is buried with Robert‟s wife.
C. Short Answer Questions
1. Describe the narrator‟s character.
He is judgmental, somewhat cynical, not overly friendly, not very open
minded, blunt, yet mostly well intentioned.
Meeting Robert helps him open his mind somewhat.
2. Why doesn‟t the narrator want Robert to visit?
He doesn‟t know Robert and has never met a blind person. He seems
afraid of Robert‟s blindness.
He also seems to be slightly resentful of Robert‟s friendship with his wife.
3. What do we know about the wife‟s character?
She is kind, likes to write poetry, and had a tough first marriage.
Given her correspondence with Robert and her interest in writing poetry,
she seems to need to communicate and express herself.
4. How does the narrator‟s attitude to Robert change?
By the end of the story, the narrator is able to get past Robert‟s blindness
and to view Robert as a person.
He also seems interested in connecting with Robert and trying to
communicate what a cathedral is.
The narrator also realizes that Robert can teach him things.
5. What‟s the significance of the sentence, “It‟s really something”?
Robert has helped the narrator see new things and experience the world
differently.
Robert is able to show the narrator that there are lots of ways to “see” and
look at the world.
D. Essay/Writing/Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the significance of the Cathedral. Why is it important to the story?
2. Analyze the character of the narrator. Is he a reliable or unreliable narrator? What
does he reveal about himself?
3. Examine all the different kinds of relationships in this story and discuss
Chandler‟s treatment of relationships.
4. How and why does the narrator‟s character change in the story?
5. What is revealed about sight and seeing in this story?
Willa Cather, “Paul’s Case”
A. Item Identification Questions (Easy)
1. Why is Paul appearing before the faculty of Pittsburgh High School?
Answer: He‟s been suspended and the faculty are assessing his request to return to
school.
2. Where does Paul work and what is his job?
Answer: He is an usher at Carnegie Hall.
3. What is the name of the street Paul lives on?
Answer: Cordelia Street.
4. What is the item of Paul‟s attire that his teachers find particularly offensive?
Answer: A red carnation.
5. What does music offer Paul?
Answer: It offers him an escape and access to “beauty” and another kind of life.
6. What is his state of mind after the music ends?
Answer: He is “always irritable and wretched” and depressed at how his life really
is.
7. Name two things that happen after the Principal talks with Paul‟s father and tells
him the stories Paul has been telling?
Answer: Two from the following: Paul‟s father makes him quit his ushering job,
leave school, go to work. He also tells the doorkeeper at the theatre that Paul is
not allowed in and tells Charley Ellis not to see Paul anymore.
8. What is Paul‟s response to his father‟s actions?
Answer: He runs away to New York.
9. What is the first thing that Paul does when he gets off the train in New York?
Answer: He buys a new suit, new clothes, new shoes, silver and trunks.
10. What story does Paul tell at the hotel?
Answer: That he is waiting for his parents who have been traveling abroad.
11. What hotel does Paul go to?
Answer: The Waldorf.
12. At the hotel, Paul “saw at a glance that everything was as it should be; there was
but one detail in his mental picture that the place did not realize.” What was
missing? What did he call and ask the bell boy to bring?
Answer: Flowers.
13. Where did the money come from?
Answer: Paul stole it while making a deposit for his employer, Denny & Carson.
14. On his eighth day in New York, what does Paul read about in the newspaper?
Answer: He reads about his stealing the money and disappearing. He also reads
that his father is coming to New York to find him.
15. The narrator writes: “It lay on his dressing-table now; he had got it out last night
when he came blindly up from dinner, but the shiny metal hurt his eyes.” What is
described here?
Answer: A revolver.
16. What kind of flowers does Paul buy during his last weekend in New York?
Answer: Red carnations.
17. The narrator writes: “he started to his feet, remembering only his resolution.”
What is his resolution?
Answer: To kill himself.
18. Where does Paul go in the final scene of the story?
Answer: He goes to the train tracks.
B. Item Identification Questions (Difficult)
1. The narrator writes: “The astonished woman could scarcely have been more hurt
and embarrassed had he struck her.” What happened?
Answer: “Once while making a synopsis of a paragraph at the blackboard, his
English teacher had stepped to his side and attempted to guide his hand; Paul had
started back with a shudder and thrust his hands violently behind him.”
2. Who says, “I don‟t really believe that smile of his comes altogether from
insolence; there‟s something sort of haunted about it”?
Answer: His drawing master.
3. Where does Paul encounter the guard who “sat in one corner, a newspaper on his
knee, a black patch over one eye and the other closed”?
Answer: At the picture gallery at Carnegie Hall.
4. Who “betrayed some embarrassment when she handed Paul the tickets, and a
hauteur which subsequently made her feel very foolish”?
Answer: His English teacher.
5. What place is described here: “There it was, what he wanted—tangibly before
him, like the fairy world of a Christmas pantomime”?
Answer: The hotel where “the better class of actors and singers” stayed.
6. Name one of the three things hanging over Paul‟s bed.
Answer: One from the following: a picture of George Washington; a picture of
John Calvin; a framed motto done by his mother (“Feed my lambs”).
7. What place is described here: “He never went up ________ without a shudder of
loathing . . . He approached it tonight with the nerveless sense of defeat, the
hopeless feeling of sinking back forever into ugliness and commonness.”
Answer: Cordelia Street or his neighborhood.
8. Where is Paul when he worries his father will shoot him and why is he there?
Answer: Paul is hiding in the basement after “breaking in” to the basement in
order to avoid his father.
9. Who “happened to be the young man who was daily held up to Paul as a model”?
Answer: The neighbor who was “clerk to one of the magnates of a great steel
corporation” and was, according to Paul‟s father, “a young man with a future.”
10. On the Sunday night, where does Paul say he‟s going and where does he actually
go?
Answer: He says he‟s going to George‟s but he actually goes to the theatre.
11. The narrator writes: “Several of Paul‟s teachers had a theory that his imagination
had been perverted by garish fiction, but the truth was that he scarcely ever read at
all.” What had sparked Paul‟s imagination instead?
Answer: Music.
12. What causes the members of the stock company to agree with the faculty and
Paul‟s father that “Paul‟s was a bad case”?
Answer: The stories that Paul fabricates about his friends at the theatre.
13. What does Paul spend two hours doing with “endless reconsidering and great
care”?
Answer: Buying clothes.
14. What does the narrator mean by “Nobody questioned the purple; he had only to
wear it passively”?
Answer: The “purple” refers to the clothes, attitude, and persona that Paul has
assumed or the “costume” of wealth and refinement that he has adopted.
15. What city‟s papers does Paul ask for at the hotel?
Answer: Pittsburgh.
16. What gives Paul “the old feeling that the orchestra had suddenly stopped, the
sinking sensation that the play was over”?
Answer: His discovery that his father was coming to find him and that his story
was exposed.
17. The narrator writes: “He saw everything clearly now.” What does Paul decide to
do after seeing “everything clearly now”?
Answer: He decides to kill himself.
18. What does the narrator mean by the statement that Paul had “dropped back into
the immense design of things”?
Answer: He killed himself or that he died.
C. Short Answer Questions
1. What does Cordelia Street represent for Paul?
It represents ugliness, monotony, lack of romance, lack of beauty and
refinement.
It also represents work, confinement, reality, and the life that his father
leads and that he wants to avoid.
2. Why does Paul choose the escape he does?
It is the antithesis of his present life.
His New York escape is one of solitude, beauty, refinement, and power.
3. Compare Paul‟s father‟s opinion of the man who “who was daily held up to Paul
as a model” with Paul‟s view of this man.
Paul‟s father thinks this man is all that Paul should aspire to be and that he
represents the ideal man.
Paul thinks he represents all that he wants to avoid and all that he does not
want to be.
What Paul‟s father sees as stability, Paul sees as monotony.
4. Why were the members of the stock company of actors (especially the women) so
amused when they heard Paul‟s stories?
Paul had clearly exaggerated, not only his relationship with them, but had
also overestimated the glamour, romance, beauty, etc., of their lives and
careers.
These stories suggest that Paul has not been able to see their lives any
clearer than his own.
5. Why does Paul leave for New York when he does?
After making him quit the theatre and taking away the only thing in his
life that he loves, Paul feels he has no other choice. The narrator writes
that “the whole thing was virtually determined.”
The alternative was to stay working for Denny & Carson, which represents
all that he wants to avoid.
D. Essay/Writing/Discussion Questions
1. Analyze Cather‟s depiction of setting. How does she connect the interior and
exterior settings?
2. Explain the significance of the following quotation as it relates to Paul‟s
character: “In Paul‟s world, the natural nearly always wore the guise of ugliness,
that a certain element of artificiality seemed to him necessary in beauty.”
3. Describe how Cather uses music as a literary motif.
4. Examine Cather‟s use of sensory detail for effect. What details does she use and
what effect do they achieve?
5. Cather writes: “They agreed with the faculty and with his father that Paul‟s was a
bad case.” Explain how and why “Paul‟s was a bad case.”
