In the following essay, Bullock argues that many of Carver's protagonists are concerned with dilemmas of masculine identity, most notably the narrator in "Cathedral."
In "The Castle of the Self," a chapter of his popular psychoanalytic study of the myths of masculinity, What a Man's Gotta Do, Antony Easthope (1990) explores the way that "in the dominant myth the masculine ego is generally imaged as a military fortification, especially in the last four hundred years of Western culture." Easthope argues that the view of ego as castle is comforting to men, because it fosters the belief that the ego can "master every threat." Defending the castle is not the satisfactory solution it seems, though, for, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the ego is an empty place, constructed only from the "continual effort" of defending "against hostile troops.....
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