In the excerpt below, Runyon examines the connecting elements and recurring themes in the short stories from Cathedral.

In the following excerpt, Saltzman compares such stories as "Feathers," "Chef's House," and "The Compartment"—which reflect hopelessness and despair—with "A Small, Good Thing" and "Where I'm Calling From" in which Carver allows his characters more compassion and choice.

In the following interview, Carver reflects on his childhood, his writing methods, and his literary influences.

In the following essay, Carver's work and career are considered in terms of the influences of his friends, mentors and editors, and his literary reputation in relation to the tremendous good will he engendered in just about everyone he met.

In the following excerpt, Campbell, a professor at Texas A&M University, traces the changes in Carver's writing, noting that in Cathedral he exhibits great skill in adopting a softer, more hopeful tone.

In the following essay, Meyer, a professor at Vanderbilt University, traces Carver's use of minimalist style throughout his career, arguing that Carver returns to his previous, more expansive style in Cathedral.

In the essay below, Nesset, a professor at Whittier college, argues that the stories in Cathedral differ from Carver's earlier work in that some of the characters are able to escape their self-imposed insularity.

In the following essay, Brown—a professor at the University of California, Davis—argues that Cathedral is not a radical departure from Carver's style, but an example of his postmodern humanist writing.

In the following essay, Facknitz compares "The Calm," "A Small Good Thing," and "Cathedral," arguing that these stories represent unique attempts by Carver to create acceptance, closure, and connection among his characters.

In the following essay, Gallagher, a poet in her own right and Carver’s wife, describes events with Carver in the months before his death and finds these events reflected in the poems contained in the collection.

In the following essay, which was originally published in Études lawrenciennes in 1988, Cushman states that although Carver was not influenced by D. H. Lawrence's short story "The Blind Man" when Carver wrote "Cathedral," the stories are very similar.

In the essay below, Gearhart traces the differences between the original story, "The Bath," and Carver's revision of the same story, "A Small, Good Thing."

In the following essay, some of Carver's late poems are read as strategies for interpreting other works by Carver, as well as intimating an ability to interpret the motives and intentions of other people.

In the essay below, Hathcock compares "Feathers" and "Cathedral" to illustrate the ways in which Carver allows his characters greater freedom and ability to redeem their lives.

In the following review, Kuzma praises the poems in Ultramarine for being “like traffic accidents, or miraculous escapes. We come away gasping, shaken, and in awe.”

[Many] of the stories of Raymond Carver [are woven into] a double strand of voyeurism and dissociation. The term "voyeurism" is used advisedly here, to mean not just sexual spying, but the wistful identification with some distant, unattainable idea of self. Dissociation is a sense of disengagement from one's own identity and life, a state of standing apart from whatever defines the self, or of being unselfed. As his dissociated characters tentatively reach out toward otherness, Carver a...

In the following essay, Goodheart analyzes Carver's moral code, arguing that he is at his best when his characters adhere to it.

In the following laudatory review of the short story collection What We Talk about When We Talk about Love, Marsh contends that the title story “suggests many of the problems of both love and conversation.”

In the following review, Houston regards “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love” as emblematic of Carver's short stories.

In the review below, Grinnell praises Carver's writing, arguing that he has improved on his old style and added new elements.

The lives Carver depicts [in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love] are narrow, starved of context. One knows virtually nothing about these people: where they're from, what they look like, what they do for a living. They inhabit a featureless landscape. The only way for them to validate themselves is through the performance of some act—any act—that gives them the illusion of free will. In "A Serious Talk," a man visits his estranged wife and sits mutely at the kitchen...

In the following essay, the novelist tells of reading poems in memory of Carver, discusses a few poems, and urges the reader to “read everything Raymond Carver wrote.”

In the following review, Bumpus discusses the dominant themes of the stories in What We Talk about When We Talk about Love.

Raymond Carver is a pernicious alchemist. Take [the] setting, for example, from the beginning of the title story of his new collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love…. Nearly all of the elements of a Carver story are here: people with the most ordinary of local habitations and names, rootless, with busted marriages behind them, who drink cheap gin at kitchen tables and for whom the outside world arrives over kitchen sinks. Base metals, dross indeed, to most writers. How many nowadays wou...

[Here is how] most of the stories that make up Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love [can] be described: low-rent tragedies involving people who read Popular Mechanics and Field and Stream, people who play bingo, hunt deer, fish, and drink. They work at shopping centers, sell books, have milk routes, or try, drunkenly, to manage a motel. Mostly they live in the Pacific Northwest, but they could just as easily live in Pensacola, Florida, or Manchester, New Hampshire; in any case ...

"'I'll see if anybody's home,'" says the nameless boy in "Why don't You Dance?," the first short story of Raymond Carver's masterful collection [What We Talk About When We Talk About Love]. The boy and his girlfriend, who are furnishing their first apartment, have happened upon an odd yard-sale in which the contents of the house have been reassembled on the lawn exactly as they stood inside. An extension cord even allows the blender, tele...

The region to which much of [Raymond Carver's Furious Seasons and Other Stories] is affixed is, roughly, the Pacific Northwest—magnificent scenery notwithstanding, never prime stomping grounds for a major writer. (Kesey, you might say, but he's too much the Merry Prankster to rest easy in the Willamette Valley; likewise Tom Robbins, bard of Puget Sound, who in the end appropriates the entire universe as his private, and cosmic, pinball machine.) Carver, though, has roots somewhere, or m...

In the following review, Knapp praises Carver's poignancy and emotional depth in Cathedral.

In the review below, Schnapp, who is a professor at Bowling Green State University, discusses the significance of the inability to articulate essential truths and beliefs in Carver's characters.

This latest collection of Mr. Carver's short stories [What We Talk About When We Talk About Love] and the clear, contemporary vision it gives of the American soul is at once chilling and unforgettably powerful. Carver's stories take us into the lives of everyday people but they are characters on the cusp between oppressive normalcy and psychic despair, and at their best or worst, Carver's people only vaguely seem to sense their predicament. There's a Chekhovian clarity to Ray Car...

In reading Raymond Carver's second volume of stories, [What We Talk About When We Talk About Love], while one is impressed, even stunned at times, by the brevity and harshness of the material, one begins, soon enough, to feel imposed upon by a monotony of tone, theme, and structure. Like Ann Beattie's stories, Mr. Carver's, when taken separately, have a power which is difficult to resist. Read together, however, these seventeen pieces (some are not really stories) put one out of sorts&#...