CHAPTER 9
THEME: SO WHAT’S YOUR STORY REALLY ABOUT?

BY TERRY BAIN

Some years ago, I had a lot of stories that I thought were finished and on their way to publication. I thought I was ready to become a famous writer, making appearances before jealous young writing students worldwide, answering questions from the audience, and going out for cocktails afterward. But magazines weren’t accepting my stories, and when people read them, they often said things about them that I didn’t understand, such as “I don’t get it.”

What is there to get? I thought. It’s a short story.

So I set out for a writer’s conference, to get some advice from a real writer, from someone who knew what he was talking about, someone who would “get it” and praise me beyond compare and introduce me to his agent, who would also “get it,” and who would send my manuscript to publishers who were just dying to jump on the bandwagon, whether they “got it” or not.

Instead I met the leader of my workshop, the fiction writer Mark Richard (a last-minute replacement author who I’d never heard of). He reviewed my story, and we talked about it, and in his final analysis he ended up asking me this: “What’s your story about?”

I looked at Mark Richard, my head spinning a little, wondering if he’d said what I thought he’d just said.

I didn’t know what to say. I reacted as you might imagine I would react in such a situation.

“I…” I said, “I guess I don’t know.”

“Find out,” he said. Though I know he said more than just “find out,” it was these words only that I remembered. Did he really mean to say that I had to know what my story was about before I could finish writing it? He seemed to be saying this as if it were the most obvious advice in the world. This was a world with which I was not yet familiar.

Of course, I think I was confusing plot with what my story was “about.” He wasn’t asking, What happens, but rather, What’s the big picture? Why should I care? He wasn’t just asking what the story was about plotwise but what was the story really about? He wanted me to take a closer look at this story and arrive at some conclusion about it. He wanted me to distill my story and arrive at its thematic center.

I decided to reread my story. It wasn’t about anything. It was all over the place. It was about everything. It didn’t hang together. It simply moved forward willy-nilly like a movie spliced out of sequence.

When I got home from the conference, I set out searching for the theme in another story I’d begun well before the conference. I had nearly abandoned this story, thinking it pretty boring. To make a long story short (though I fear it’s already too late), the revised version of my story was accepted and published in The Gettysburg Review. And several months later the story was republished in the O. Henry Awards. I don’t believe it would have been published in the first place had I not revised it with theme in mind, and this is why I’m here to harp on the topic of theme.

WHAT IS THEME?

The theme is the container for your story. Theme will attempt to hold all the elements of your story in place. It is like a cup. A vessel. A goblet. The plot and characters and dialogue and setting and voice and everything else are all shaped by the vessel. In many cases the vessel will go unnoticed by readers, but it would be very difficult to drink a glass of wine without the glass itself. The glass itself is, of course, part of the experience, but it is not one we always pay much attention to.

Okay, okay, so I used a nice metaphor. But now you want to know: what the heck is a theme? First, the word theme is confusing and may do you as much harm as good. You shouldn’t think of theme as the ponderous sort of explanations given by critics and academics. That doesn’t have much to do with writing a story. And you’ll get into an equal amount of trouble if you think of theme as synonymous with message or moral. That kind of thing is best left to pundits and philosophers.

The novelist John Gardner wisely said: “By theme here we mean not a message—a word no good writer likes applied to his work—but the general subject, as the theme of an evening of debates may be World Wide Inflation.” You see, the theme may be simply world wide inflation without there being any elegant solution for inflation or even a single point of view on the subject. The great Anton Chekhov also said something smart. He said that the fiction writer does not need to solve a problem so much as state the problem correctly.

So, you see, you’re off the hook. You don’t have to create themes that will solve the problems of the world. You just have to shine your flashlight on some aspect of life and let the reader see what’s there. Not every aspect. Some aspect. And that’s a key point because a theme should give a story some kind of focus, in a manner similar to how plot gives a story focus.

We’re probably best off by just saying that theme is some kind of unifying idea in a story. Any kind of unifying idea will do, truth be told.

Ever read the children’s picture book Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown? The story is simple. A bunny is going to bed, and all the things in his room are introduced to the reader. The story, or perhaps the bunny, then proceeds to say good night to all the things in his room: socks, clocks, kittens, mittens, brush, and mush. But there is a point in the book at which the page is blank, and the caption reads, “Goodnight nobody.” I am always surprised and delighted when I come to this page, and it has only recently occurred to me why this is.

When I read the caption “Goodnight nobody,” I see the author’s hand. I see the background to the story. I begin to look for a deeper meaning there. I think to myself, What does Margaret Wise Brown want me to be looking for when I read the line “Goodnight nobody”? And what I understand, eventually, is that I am moved to create meaning from this very simple book. The meaning I take from it is this—that at the precise moment we arrive at the blank page, the bunny has fallen asleep. The room is filled with the quiet breathing of sleep. The theme of Goodnight Moon? Simple, silent sleep.

A well-defined theme gives a story a kind of focus, a center. A well-defined theme allows a writer to distill the ideas, to present them in a simple fashion, to tell the story that will last longer than half an hour. Goodnight Moon is a classic children’s book not because it has fancy pictures or a high-concept plot, but because it’s a story, with a deeper, more meaningful theme than can be found on the surface.

Have you ever read a story and said to yourself, Well, that was nice, but what does it matter? Don’t you want someone who reads your story to instead think, Wow, I can’t stop thinking about that story! Of course you do. And one of the ways to achieve that effect is by cultivating a theme and making an appropriate vessel from which your reader may drink.

By working with theme, you will take what may be an okay, nice, lovely, charming story, and help it become myth—turning it into a part of the consciousness of the reader, something that lasts longer than half an hour.

You may not think it’s possible to crystallize the themes of great and profound works as neatly as I did for Goodnight Moon, but I maintain that you can. At the risk of sounding like a fusty old professor, let me give you a sampling of themes from some great works of fiction, and all of these are, of course, open to interpretation.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy—the myriad ramifications of war and peace
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald—the corruption of the American dream
“The Lady with the Dog” by Anton Chekhov—the contrast between romantic love and the constraints of marriage
1984 by George Orwell—a police state like this could happen
“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor—the possibility of finding grace through facing evil
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov—the power of desire
“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates—the forming of identity

And sometimes a theme is, more or less, a message. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens probably falls into this category. You remember it. There’s a mean old greedy geezer named Ebenezer Scrooge and he really doesn’t give a damn for anything in the world but his hordes of money. Then one Christmas Eve the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future visit Scrooge and show him that he’s a lonely soul who has squandered his life and may soon lie unloved and unremembered in a cold grave. Lo and behold, Scrooge sees the error of his ways and instantly transforms into a new man. Though the story certainly deals with greed, the real theme is something like: Learn to correct the errors of your life before it’s too late. Yes, that’s a message, but Dickens gets away with it (as he gets away with so many things) because he knows how to tell an absolutely wonderful story.

YOUR TURN:
Think of one of your favorite works of fiction, perhaps one of the stories you referred to in a previous exercise. Do your best to state the dominant theme of the story in a single word, phrase, or sentence. More than anything else, what is that story really about? Some hints: look for recurring images; ponder the title; examine the climax. But please don’t cheat by calling up your college literature professor.

KNOW THY THEME

Most great stories have themes and your story probably needs one too. And you should know what it is. Yeah, I know you’re shaking your head, hoping I’m not saying what you think I’m saying. You think that you don’t have to know what your story is about any more than you have to know what the moon is made of. You think writing is too mysterious and magical to ever figure out your story’s theme.

But, no, I’m telling you that you can write your story better—craft a more appealing vessel—if you actually know your story’s theme. You don’t have to tell anyone, even if they ask you in interviews for fancy publications, but you need to know.

For another thing, should you neglect to supply your readers with a theme, they are likely to grab one that is handy, quite possibly the incorrect one, the one that does not contain the warning “Caution: contents may be hot.” Provide them with a theme so that they do not mistake your story about natural consequences for a story about the cuteness of puppies.

Can a story have more than one theme? Probably. But it is best for the short story writer to have a dominant theme in mind. The novel writer will probably have a greater opportunity to allow several themes to creep into the novel, just as the novelist may use subplots. When the contents are vast, it’s possible that a more complex vessel is necessary. But even the novelist might be best off working with a single, dominant theme in which everything is contained.

In her collection of essays, Mystery and Manners, Flannery O’Connor gives the reader a clue as to what she has found in her own story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” She shows us that she does, indeed, know what her stories are about, and has set out to make her readers aware of exactly what it is that’s going on in the story:

A good story is literal in the same sense that a child’s drawing is literal. When a child draws, he doesn’t intend to distort but to set down exactly what he sees, and as his gaze is direct, he sees the lines that create motion. Now the lines of motion that interest the writer are usually invisible. They are the lines of spiritual motion. And in this story you should be on the lookout for such things as the action of grace in the Grandmother’s soul, and not for the dead bodies.

O’Connor worked with theme. You can sense that she knows what she’s writing about, that she has a complete handle on what is at the center of her stories, and she’s able to keep a grip on it from beginning to end. As a result, her stories expand. They are able to slip off the side of the page somehow, to work their way into your life.

Interestingly, though, in the above passage, O’Connor makes the mistake of believing that it is important for her readers to know exactly what it was she was writing about, when the truth is far more interesting, and almost magical. A reader will perhaps get something entirely different out of reading a good story than what the writer intended. Maybe the readers will be paying too much attention to the dead bodies to notice the grace. Or they may see the grandmother’s actions as something entirely different from grace. But, if the writer was confident enough in her thematic resonance, the theme will still be absorbed, in some way, by the reader.

So while you should be aware of your theme, you should also beware forcing it down the reader’s throat (which O’Connor never did). Forcing readers into understanding what we want them to understand is what will get us into trouble. We’ll end up writing didactic, forgettable stories. If we overadorn our theme vessel with bright colors and too many words and signposts, the reader is likely to care less about the wine inside the vessel.

Though you are looking for theme, and you will be revising with a theme in mind, don’t spend any time making sure your readers are going to “get it.” Don’t overclarify your theme. If you’re writing about the destruction of the rain forest, it’s probably enough that you’ve included lush scenes from just such a forest, and described how the place has changed your main character. Your protagonist does not need to stand on a soapbox and promote the welfare of the forest. In fact, your protagonist can be the enemy. He could be a forester who devotes his life to destroying the damn forests. The point will eventually come across.

After all, little children don’t ponder, discuss, and write dissertations on Goodnight Moon. But, on some subconscious level, they most certainly “get it.” Theme does not have to instruct; it merely has to connect on some kind of deep level.

YOUR TURN:
Imagine a soldier has just returned from a war and is having a strange time readjusting to his previous life. You can pick the war, even using an imaginary one. Flesh out the character and the setting. Then write a brief passage where this character is going about some everyday activity, but having difficulty with it. Whatever you do, do not think about the theme of this piece. Just focus on the character and what he or she is trying to do. Once you have written the passage, write down three to seven possible themes for this piece. Pick the theme that seems the most interesting. Ponder what direction the story may take using this theme in a subtle way.

SLEUTHING OUT YOUR THEME

One way to avoid overemphasizing your theme is by not beginning there. The writer who begins to write with a theme in mind almost invariably ends up with a didactic and forgettable tract. If you begin thinking, I’m going to write about the politics of academia, then you will probably end up with something. You’ll have a lot of words and sentences and commas and periods, but it most likely won’t be good fiction, something that lasts longer than a few moments. Begin writing elsewhere.

Just start by telling a story.

Telling a story will take you into the heart of the story, and at the heart of the story there will be a theme that you can dig out and crystallize, and I’m willing to place a pretty big bet on that.

Take A Christmas Carol. Did Dickens begin by thinking something like, I wish to write a story that will instruct my numerous readers that they should correct the grave errors of their ways before it is, indeed, too late? Or did he simply begin by telling a story? I like to think the latter answer is correct. He began by writing about Scrooge, and arrived at the rest based on the characters in the necessary actions that take place to tell the story that is told. You have to create the world from scratch no matter what you do. So that’s what you do. You start with story, and later you go back and try to retrofit the story to the theme.

YOUR TURN:
Just to see how difficult it is, write a short piece starting with a theme. Here is your theme: faith. Spend some time contemplating characters, situations, settings, and so forth that may illustrate this theme in an interesting, noncliché manner. Once you have some ideas in place, start writing a story with faith as the theme. You can write just a passage or you can write a whole story. Who knows? Starting with a theme may just give you a focus that allows you to write a wonderful piece, in which case you’re free to write a story, every now and then, that does begin with theme.

Once you’ve written the first draft of your story, this really isn’t a bad time to start thinking about theme. If something occurs to you during the first draft, don’t be afraid to jot it down. Also, don’t be afraid of changing your mind later. If it turns out your first impressions were wrong, no problem. The worst that could happen is that you would have to revise your story, and you have to do that anyway.

The key thing in this process is to let the theme emerge naturally from the story you are telling, not impose the theme from above. This means that you’ll have to look at what you’ve written and sleuth out the theme.

Yes, it’s possible that as you’re working on a story, a theme simply comes to you. Oh, you might think, this is really about the search for truth. If that happens, great. Go ahead and let yourself be aware of this theme, and allow it to shape your story. But it’s not always quite that simple. So let me give you some tips for finding the crucial clues that will lead you to the theme of your story.

A great technique is to start asking yourself questions. Do the characters’ actions imply any universal truths? Does the superhero’s triumph over the green-faced man represent a broader theme of good triumphing over evil? Does the postman’s role in saving your character’s life imply the presence of everyday angels? Does your protagonist’s hunt for her keys represent a more universal search for the keys of meaning in life?

You can also see if there is a social context to your story. Does your protagonist’s relative poverty tell you that your story is about poverty in general? Does the ruthlessness with which your forester destroys tell you that your story is about destruction?

Another way to search for theme is by doing a kind of reduction or condensation. Think, as you try to discover what your story is about, How do I reduce my story thematically? Try to simplify your ideas into a few words: my story is about the inevitability of love; it’s about abuse of all kinds; it’s about addiction; the beauty of fruit; fear; longing; loathing. Death! It’s about death!

It may seem like cheating to reduce your profound work of art to a single word or phrase, but Flannery O’Connor wasn’t afraid to say her story was about “the action of grace,” and I assure you Ms O’Connor was no cheat.

Here’s a good one. What made you start writing this story in the first place? Is the theme of your story buried in your impetus to write it? Why did you decide to write a fictional tale of your grandparents’ move from North Dakota to California? Is your story about alienation? Travel? Seniors trying to break into the movie business?

Or just start looking very closely at what is already there. Remember that story I told you about? The one I revised with theme in mind and eventually published? Here’s what I did in my revision process:

The story was partially set in the game room of a house—a pool table, a strobe light, a bar—and concerned the head games of teenagers. Specifically, the more dominant of two friends was trying to force his friend to kiss the neighbor girl by kissing her himself. It was a kind of game for him, to manipulate his friend. So I figured my theme must be the games people play with one another. Then I zeroed in a bit closer and decided that my story was about the games of adolescence, which was more specific than the games people play with one another and sounded less like a Top 40 hit. I titled my story “Games.” I added a new ending. I removed some of the details and scenes that weren’t necessary, that weren’t fitting into my thematic vessel. I added a few new details and scenes that seemed appropriate, always with an eye toward the games of adolescence. And, as I mentioned earlier, the story got published and won some recognition. Also let me point out that the editor who accepted the story had already rejected it once, liking it but not quite enough.

Perhaps certain things keep recurring in your story, almost functioning as symbols and metaphors, as did my games. Perhaps the story occurs in a restaurant, and the symbols are mostly food items. Your theme might be related to consuming, eating, satiating, or desire, among other things.

You can also watch for repeated words or images. Or words and passages that strike you as particularly poignant. When you were writing these things, you had something in mind. Chances are good the theme is buried in there. For instance, the word ring can mean more than ring. It can also mean marriage, boxing, entrapment, even communication. Where you go with this word depends on what theme you choose for the story.

You can also look at individual sentences and glean something from them. The kernel of your story might be in there. For instance, if you look at your first sentence and it reads, “She walked between the Dumpsters, watching for rats,” there are several thematic elements to the line that you can take note of. Someone walking between the Dumpsters might be homeless. Rats and Dumpsters imply a kind of filth. Watching for rats implies a kind of fear, or perhaps hunger. Some of the thematic elements in this sentence will depend on where the rest of the story goes, whether your protagonist is homeless or not, whether this is a familiar setting or not, whether there are actually any rats or not.

Write in the margins of your story what the possible themes or clues to themes might be. When a character seems to be playing with another character in the story, you might write games in the margin. When the protagonist tries to beat the sales record for the quarter, you might write competition in the margin. Hopefully some kind of commonality will begin to form. Or one of your notations will strike you as particularly relevant to the story. Circle words or phrases that seem especially poignant, that seem to point to a larger theme, or that seem to be the most essential pieces to the story. Don’t do anything with these notations just yet. Just circle them. You can come back to your notations later, maybe making further notations, maybe just rereading it, slapping yourself on the head and saying, Of course, it’s about the importance of everyday heroes.

Let’s use Goodnight Moon as an example again. If you were writing the story to Goodnight Moon, you might read your text one line at a time and make the following notes:

Text: “In the great green room”
Notation: Life. Depth. Solitude. Peace. Quiet.

Text: “There was a telephone”
Notation: Busyness. Life.

Text: “And a red balloon”
Notation: Play. Fun.

Text: “And a picture of—the cow jumping over the moon And there were three little bears sitting on chairs” Notation: Childhood. Nursery rhyme.

Later in the story you might have notations as follows:

Text: “Goodnight comb
And goodnight brush”
Notation: Night / sleep for everything.

Text: “Goodnight nobody
Goodnight mush”
Notation: Simplicity. Sleep. The bunny has fallen asleep.

Hopefully, as you accumulate these details, a theme will appear. (In this case: sleep.) This theme may not be the exact theme that you will end up with, but it will certainly be better than the vague notion you had before. And I thought the story was about rabbits!

However you go about finding your theme, you will find it. Then what? Well, you might write your theme in big block letters on the first page of your story or on a sign posted over your workplace. Or, if you’re still zeroing in, you might keep a list of possible themes on a piece of paper or on a document in your computer. Or you might have a fabulous memory for this sort of thing.

By whatever method, you’ll want to be keeping your theme in mind as you return to work on your story.

You might ask, What if I don’t get the theme right? And I would answer, You will.

Why? Because it’s critical that you are confident in your skills. So you will get it right. You are the single most knowledgeable person regarding the theme of your story. The theme of your story is whatever you discover. You can shout down your friends and relations by telling them emphatically that your story is about death because you absolutely get to decide. They can decide too, of course, and they can disagree with you, and that’s part of the fiction game.

YOUR TURN:
Take one of the pieces you wrote for an exercise in a previous chapter. Sleuth out the theme that may be lurking behind the words. Does a character’s situation say anything about human nature? Is there a particular phrase or sentence that resonates for you? There’s no telling where the clues lie, but they are probably there. Once you’ve identified a possible theme, write it down. Then revise the piece, keeping your theme in mind. If you have to alter or even throw out most of the original piece, so be it. A theme demands attention.

THEME TOUCHES EVERYTHING

As you may recall, I said you probably won’t be working much with theme on the first draft of your story. What I’m implying, of course, is that you won’t be writing just one draft of your story but many. And on the second and third and fourth (and so on) drafts, yes, sir, that’s when you’ll be thinking about theme a great deal.

The choices you make about theme will strongly influence how you revise your story. For one thing, the theme will help you make sense of what is there. If the protagonist’s hunt for her keys does indeed represent a more universal search for truth, then perhaps her visit to the palm reader makes more sense. And maybe, while she’s at her mother’s house, she could be looking for something in the photo album rather than just at the pictures. What is she looking for? Perhaps her flipping channels on the car radio means more than just hating the music playing on the airwaves. She’s looking for something. She can’t find it. Not only does this give us an excellent way to revise our story, it allows us to expand or enliven the plot in a more natural and thematic way. Continue to cultivate these thematic threads. Choose them. Allow them to shape your story.

You see, knowing your theme actually helps you make key decisions about what to keep and what not to keep. If my story was about, say, immortality, then anything in it that didn’t somehow relate to immortality could be cut. And I could add things to my story without fear of becoming confused or confounded. So long as what I wrote had something to do with immortality, then I was safe.

I may end up looking at a sentence for an hour, thinking, Is this sentence about immortality? In the end, maybe that particular sentence doesn’t matter so much. Maybe it’s just the sentence you need to get a character from the door to the kitchen. Maybe whatever’s in the kitchen has to do with immortality. Or maybe she just wants a cucumber sandwich and you cannot deny her a cucumber sandwich because she’s hungry.

But once you find a theme and begin working with it in the revision process, you should focus the story with that theme in mind, letting most, if not all, of what’s there relate, in some way, to your theme. Thus, the story will attain depth, since the repetition of thematic elements will naturally pile up, one upon another, creating a kind of resonance within the story. Yes, thematic repetition is good. If you are able to provide enough elements relating to your theme, eventually the reader will begin to have a clearer picture of a story with a center, rather than a story that proceeds as life proceeds, without much structure or resonance.

At this point, you may be wondering two things: 1) Does most everything in a story really relate to its theme? 2) How do I go about revising a story so most everything relates to the theme? Good questions, both. I think the best way to answer these questions is by looking at a particular story from the viewpoint of its theme. Since we’ve been discussing Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” in this book, let us use that one. While we’re doing this, you may be able to see how Carver made decisions joining his theme to all the major craft elements of fiction as he took this story through the revision process.

For starters, we should ponder what the theme of “Cathedral” actually is. If I had to crystallize it, and I do, I’d probably say the theme of “Cathedral” is True vision is much deeper than the physical ability to see.

Carver gets working on the theme right from the get-go. The story begins:

This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to spend the night

And a few lines later the narrator says:

I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew.

Already we’re getting the sense that the narrator, a man who can physically see, is emotionally blind because of his lack of interest in meeting a good friend of his wife’s. The wife’s friend is named Robert, but the narrator is so disinterested in this fellow that he refers to him simply as “the blind man.” The narrator, in fact, isn’t interested in much of anything. He stumbles through life blindly oblivious to just about everything. He’s blind to Robert and his life, because everything he learns about Robert is limited by his intense focus on Robert’s blindness. He’s shocked to see a blind man with a beard, and without dark glasses, and smoking, and having a diverse work history. The narrator is also oblivious to his wife and her interests. He doesn’t get into her poetry, or poetry in general, and doesn’t want to look closely at her past or, for that matter, her present. Perhaps most importantly he seems to want to be oblivious to his own life—his job, his bad habits, and so forth. We sense his ideal evening is getting drunk, getting stoned, and watching TV. Perhaps this personal obliviousness is why he never even reveals his own name.

The protagonist, the narrator, fits perfectly into the story’s theme. But so do the other two characters. If the man who can physically see is emotionally “blind,” then it helps to have the physically blind character someone who can “see” in the emotional sense. Such is the case with Robert. He grabs life with gusto, seemingly interested in anything that comes across his path. We sense he loved his recently deceased wife deeply and has cultivated many friendships, and even his vigorous drinking and smoking seem to be social tools rather than crutches. Hey, he even has two television sets and he prefers the one with color!

The narrator’s wife, the only other character in the story, seems to be an absolutely lovely person, cherishing her friendship with Robert and doing all she can to treat him graciously. If the wife were a shrew, we might understand why the narrator takes her for granted, but her loveliness reinforces the narrator’s emotional “blindness.”

These important character traits are revealed clearly with just about every line of dialogue in the story. For example:

I said, “Let me get you a drink. What’s your pleasure? We have a little of everything. It’s one of our pastimes.”

“Bub, I’m a Scotch man myself,” he said fast enough in this big voice.

“Right,” I said. Bub! “Sure you are. I knew it.”

He let his fingers touch his suitcase, which was sitting alongside the sofa. He was taking his bearings. I didn’t blame him for that.

“I’ll move that up to your room,” my wife said.

It’s all there—the narrator’s disinterest, Robert’s gregariousness, and the wife’s sweetness. What the characters say supports the theme, though, of course, they don’t know it.

Carver chose the first-person point of view for this story and, in relation to the theme, it seems an inspired choice. We’re not just watching the narrator’s lack of “vision,” we’re experiencing it with him as we live inside his mind. Interestingly, the narrator’s blindness makes him a somewhat unreliable narrator. We don’t trust his opinions, and we’re right not to. He tells us close-minded things that we, the reader, know to be silly, like:

This blind man, feature this, he was wearing a full beard! A beard on a blind man! Too much, I say.

Also notice how the voice of the narrator reinforces his lack of “vision,” the voice being tinged with cynicism and ignorance. Throughout the story, the POV and voice are working hand in hand, perfectly, to convey the narrator’s limited scope.

Perhaps you’re wondering about the setting. The entire story takes place in the narrator’s house. But we never get a real good sense of that house. As a rule, Carver is sparing with detail, but it seems especially appropriate in this case. Even in his own home, the narrator seems unable to “see” things. This lack of giving detail, or “seeing,” extends really to most of the description in this story. Nothing—the house, the food, the liquor, the wife—is described with any relish or specificity. Notice the apathy in such a description as this:

The news program ended. I got up and changed the channel. I sat back down on the sofa.

If we didn’t know better we might be tempted to think that Raymond Carver wasn’t a very good writer. Oh, but he is, though, because he is merging his POV, voice, and description choices to fully reveal the narrator’s “blindness,” and, thus, his story’s theme. And, tellingly, the descriptions become more specific and vivid when the narrator finally does begin to “see” toward the story’s end, as when he is watching a documentary about cathedrals on TV:

The camera moved to a cathedral outside of Lisbon. The differences in the Portuguese cathedral compared with the French and Italian were not that great. But they were there.

Now this incredibly oblivious narrator is even starting to notice the difference between Portuguese and French and Italian cathedrals. That’s quite a leap.

The theme is certainly apparent in every progression of the plot. Plot is usually a living illustration of theme—theme in motion, you might say. If you show the theme through the actions of the characters, then you never really need to state the theme, and, in this story, Carver never does.

As we saw in chapter 3, the major dramatic question of this story is whether our narrator will ever come to truly “see,” which certainly works together with the theme of True vision is much deeper than the physical ability to see. All the events of the story, from beginning to end, push the narrator closer and closer to the moment when he finally does come to “see.” The narrator tries with all his might to remain detached, and Robert never lets up on the narrator, being charming and inquisitive and caring until finally the narrator is quite simply unable to resist Robert’s life-affirming “vision.” At the story’s climax—where the narrator draws a cathedral—the plot and theme come together in one blindingly bright moment of glory.

At the climax, you have these two guys watching television, and they see this cathedral. Well, no. The narrator, who has physical sight, sees the cathedral. Of course Robert, the blind man, has never seen a cathedral. So, what happens? The sighted man describes the cathedral to the blind man, at the blind man’s request. Only the sighted man is emotionally “blind,” so he doesn’t know how to describe it adequately. He confesses to Robert:

“It just isn’t in me to do it.”

He’s been the way he is for a very long time. He doesn’t know how to be any different. Will he ever “see”?Maybe, maybe not.

But the blind man, Robert, will insist on it because, of course, he does possess true “vision.” He knows that the narrator can’t “see.” He knows this is important, to help this man, or maybe to help his friend who has married this emotionally “blind” man. So Robert encourages the narrator to get paper and a pencil, and the two of them get down on the floor, and the narrator attempts to draw the cathedral with the blind man’s hand resting on top of his own hand, the hand doing the drawing. Robert claims this will help him get a sense of the cathedral, but maybe Robert really just wants to offer the narrator the courage it will take to accomplish this task. And the narrator does accomplish the task. He ultimately manages to draw a cathedral. When he’s done, he closes his eyes. And finally, miraculously, he can “see.”

And perhaps by now you are seeing how every major craft element of this short story converges on its theme. But there is one more thing worth mentioning—the symbol of the cathedral. Something becomes a symbol in a story when it takes on a meaning larger than what it really is. Symbols are nothing a writer should worry about too much; rather, they should emerge naturally, as probably happened with this story. But at some point, Carver must have become aware of cathedrals as something symbolic because he chose to call the story “Cathedral.”

Why a cathedral? Think about it. Cathedrals are perhaps the most magnificent and awe-inspiring man-made structures on earth, and they were built to bring humans closer to God, to elevate the human soul as high as it could possibly travel. When the narrator learns to “see” a cathedral, he has elevated himself about as far as he can go. By story’s end, not only does the narrator have the physical ability to see, but he has gone deeper to achieve true vision. In a big way.

YOUR TURN:
Return to the favorite work of fiction for which you figured out the theme. Get your hands on a copy of it. Focus on several pages of the text. Write down everything you see there that seems to relate to your chosen theme for the work. Anything is fair game—the characters, setting, voice, title, opening line … If not much seems to relate to your theme, what does that tell you? That the theme is illustrated with great subtlety? Or not illustrated well enough? Or do you have the wrong theme?

Can you do what Carver did with this story on your own works of fiction? Can you, as they say, try this at home? Of course you can. Simply discover the theme of your story, after a draft or two, then revise and revise. And with each revision look for ways to make all your choices fluidly and delicately flow inside the vessel of your theme. If you find this difficult, do as the narrator of “Cathedral” did—simply close your eyes and “see.”