Best of the Week: Cathedral

I missed a lot of our discussion of the short story Cathedral this week, but I was here when we talked about what I thought was the most interesting part of the story: the last line, where the narrative ends abruptly at the climax with a rather bland line of dialogue: "It's really something." We decided in class that the purpose of this was to maintain a consistent voice: throughout the story, the narrator had been fairly inarticulate; for him to eloquently and succinctly sum up what he had experienced would be jarring. This is representative of the aspect of this story I liked the most: the narrator's convincing voice made him seem like a real person and not just the author's invention. Like the characters in Kite Runner, King Lear and Heart of Darkness, he was more convincing because of his imperfections. In fact, the character was probably more impressive than Amir: many authors give their characters moral imperfections, but rarely do we find characters with difficulty expressing themselves. In first person stories, the narrator often seems to be a writer himself. In Kite Runner this makes sense--Amir really is a writer--but even when the narrator is uneducated, they seem to have a sense of how to tell a good story. To break away from this as the author does in Cathedral seems like an odd choice--why would you actively make your writing less coherent and engaging?--but, for this short story at least, it works. For a few pages, we see a writer using the voice of someone who is not a writer, and it's an interesting change of pace.