A comparative study between Carver’s short story “The Cathedral” and Donald Barthelme’s story the balloon sanctions the reader to comprehend the essential features of metafiction. Carver’s short story “The Cathedral” explores the isolated status of human being because of various reasons. Barthelme’s story the balloon demonstrates man’s inability to live in his culture and his conscious tendency of escaping to a world of imagination or romance. Both of them suggest various views that exist in the real world and the writers employ words and symbols in both illusive and allusive ways to create fictional characteristics. In each stories reader can find fictional narrative have various characteristics such as vagueness, illusion, allusion, and ambiguity. Metafiction is related with modern and post modern literature and it is a widely accepted type of fiction that self consciously and address the techniques of fiction. The most significant features of this literary genre is it does not permit the reader to forget he or she is enjoying a fiction. It often helps the writer to express the relationship between reality and fiction. Both stories suggest the view point that reason and intellectual knowledge is insufficient for modern man to triumph over his struggles to find existential status. Through the effective implementation of specific fictional narrative both Cathedral and The balloon take up some features of metafiction.
Raymond Carver’s short story, “Cathedral,” often inspires the reader to consider as an example of metafiction and the author permits the reader to experience the afflictions of isolation in the modern world. Analyzing the story reader can feel unsure about the cause of discomfort of the protagonist Robert. It is crystal clear that author have kept a complete image about the character Robert when the time of writing this story and he shows his despise in the very beginning of the story. The story suggests some concepts about the reading and creation of fiction. The story discusses the past relationship of Carver’s wife with her first husband and these narrative techniques play a vital role in demonstrating the real conflict between Carver and the blind man. Reader can feels Carver’s discomfort towards Robert through his words. “I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me” (Carver).
His ignorance about the blind person creates dramatic diversions to the story and each and every incident in the story reveals a kind of materialist ideology that helps the reader to comprehend what to see and not see in the story. Reader cannot know how a word is “profound” or “vague” or “erroneous” without knowing a priori something of the writer’s objective. Harold Bloom examines the view that; “Carver acknowledges the duplicity of words while asserting in the same breath that the writer fight against this liability, those emotions must be “bridled” (Bloom, 71).
The whole story exposes the transformation of the narrator from contemptuous and misanthropic to a social one and the words and symbols which the author used leads the reader to relate his perceptions with reality. With the background of this narrative technique one can find the relationship between reality and fiction and it makes a possible conclusion the Carver’s story shares the features of met fiction. Words and symbols are presented as illusive in the beginning of the story and reader can see that it is an example of effective use of foreshadowing. Through the illusive use of words and symbols author makes the reader to form a vague picture about the narrator’s character. The concepts of blindness and sight are presented as effective symbols in the story Cathedral and it exposes the reality that the narrator begins with both material and emotional blindness and transformed to spiritual insight. A kind of suspension of narrative direction is visible in the story Cathedral when the narrator is hearing the tape of the blind man’s talking about him and it makes an illusion in the story that what it was the blind man find in the narrator.
Concluding events in the story reveals an allusive use of words and images and here reader can experience fictional characteristics. After the dinner three of them, narrator, his wife and the blind man are relaxing. Here one can see the television program about cathedral that they have watched and narrator’s distaste gradually transformed to a kind of compassion. Reader can easily reach some allusions through words and symbols and author’s conscious efforts to allow characters to determine a kind of artistic sense within them.
Reader can experience the similar rhetorical features that he or she found in the story Cathedral in another piece of literature The balloon written by Donald Barthelme.
Critics and researchers have often considered Donald Barthelme as an exponent of metafiction in English literature. Donald Barthelme’s story The balloon presents some significant features of metafiction and it inspire the reader to relate various images and symbols which depicted in the story to the reality. A detailed analysis of the story, Donald Barthelme’s “The balloon” permits the reader to admit the fact that it is a one of the most significant mischievous satires of post-modernism. The story “The balloon” explains metaphor about the position of an art and author consciously presents words and symbols both illusive and ambiguous. Donald Barthelme is not free from the touch of existential philosophy and author blends realism and imagination through the material status of the balloon. The “meaning” of balloon is totally unknown for the readers and here one can notice author’s efforts to reveals the illusive world or social chaos.
Donald Barthelme’s story situates with the place of Fourteenth Street and the fourteenth street is the important beautiful and suitable location of this story. This selection helps the reader to interact with the fiction and reader’s imagination act as a part of the fiction. The balloon looks like to be a respect to this post-modern thought of challenge understanding and it means that modern man likes to withdraw himself to a world of privacy. Donald Barthelme laughs at the public’s uncomfortable efforts to understand the huge gray balloon and it is applied resembling some extra objects to help out public in adjusting themselves. Like Raymond Carver’s short story, “Cathedral,” Barthelme also presents specific narrative technique to communicate with his readers. The balloon is presented as a symbol and the meaning is ambiguous in the opening. The online article entitled Postmodern World, Postmodern Relationships: The Artist and Society Relationship in Barthelme’s Fiction explains “The narrator does not intend this private meaning to be apprehended by his audience at the outset” (Toksz, 3).
General public starts in an inquisitive method to put themselves within relation toward characteristics of the balloon. The balloon is the art object it is too gives independence and an instant of interruption from the custom. So the repressing actualities of the world because it is amazing that they can participate with or take liberally.one can see that the story “The balloon” points out that devastating wisdom that existence is not as superior as we can anticipate it to be more to ever for the artist. The story exposes the simple event of the narrator is longing for his beloved and embraces her. as an alternative of denying the meaning to the object, author provides it an incontrovertible meaning, which is insignificant in the matters of the existing world. Analyzing the whole story it is clear that Barthelme suggests an existential thought and illustrates the concept of irony that all human being are created the same by their indistinguishable desire for individuality. Reactions of different people like children, youngsters, old people, employers and authorities heighten the afflictions of modern man and through these readers can get an opportunity to communicate his own existing surroundings.
To conclude, considering the stories Cathedral and The balloon reader can acquire a possible way of understanding the features of metafiction and both of the stories practice a specific fictional narrative. Events and images in both stories are often presented as ambiguous in the initial stage and then it transformed in to an allusive way. Narrative of both stories permits the readers to see or think about the topics that the authors portrayed in each stories. A kind of controlled use of reader’s imagination is invited in both stories and through this authors ensure the connection between perception and reality.
References
Bloom, Harold. Raymond Carver. Infobase Publishing. 2002. Print.
Carver, Raymond. The Cathedral.
Toksz, Fgen. Postmodern World, Postmodern Relationships: The Artist and Society Relationship in Barthelme’s Fiction. Dogus Universities. Web. 2010.