A Foucauldian Interpretation Of Raymond Carver’s Cathedral

Raymond Carver is one of the famous short novelists, named as the American’sChekhov after his death. Carver became especially famed at his early50s, with thepublication of Cathedral in1983, which is12short stories collection. Cathedral wasenthusiastically received by critics and Carver himself also thought Cathedral is moremature compared with his early works. As a representative of American working class,he still concerns ordinary people, their failure and their endless struggle in Cathedral,applying the plain and concise language. So most of the attention to this collectionstill goes to the writing style such as minimalism or the motif research such as thecharacter’s struggle or failure. With seldom attention to the discourse crisis of thecharacters, this paper aims at exploring the character’s living condition that Carver’sdescribed in the12stories of this collection applying Michel Foucault’s discourse andpower theory.This thesis consists of six chapters.The first chapter provides a brief introduction of Raymond Carver, a summary ofCathedral and the literary review of this book.The second chapter gives an overview of discourse theory of Michel Foucault. Itmainly focuses on what is Foucault’s power and discourse theory, the relationshipbetween power and discourse and the disciplinary power and Bio-power whichFoucault mainly illustrated.The third chapter illustrates the discourse crisis of American working class in thiscollection. This chapter applies the Foucault’s disciplinary power theory to show thatthe characters are in the network of power, they are all under the surveillance ofothers.The fourth chapter tries to apply Foucault’s Bio-power to analyze the ubiquitousdiscourse crisis between the characters in their kinship, working field or socialrelationship.The fifth chapter applies Foucault’s Technology of Self to analyze that the characters’ subjectivity construction in Cathedral, just as Michel Foucault constantlyemphasized that “discourse is a practice or exercise, during which, the subjectsconstruct their world and they are subjected to the rules or limitation of the discourseat the same time.”1Chapter six is the conclusion of this research. We all live in a world with theubiquitous power which takes the form of disciplinary power and Bio-power. Theworking class characters of this collection are also under this environment. Theyfailed, they struggled and seemed never getting out of the trouble. Raymond Carver istheir spokesman, who dared to face the despair straightly. Facing the despair, diggingthe reason and criticizing the unfairness of discourse and power have the actualmeaning.