In "The Compartment," one of Raymond Carver's bleakest stories, a man passes through the French countryside in a train, en route to a rendezvous
with a son he has not seen for many years. "Now and then," the narrator says of the man, "Meyers saw a farmhouse and its outbuildings, everything surrounded by a wall. He thought this might be a good way to live-in an old house surrounded by a wall" (Cathedral 48). Due to a last minute change of heart, however, Meyers chooses to stay insulated in his "compartment" and, remaining on the train, reneges on his promise to the boy, walling out everything external to his selfish world, paternal obligation included.

Meyers's tendency toward insularity is not, of course, unique among the characters in Cathedral or among the
characters of earlier volumes. In Will You Be Quiet, Please? there is the paranoid self-cloistering of Slater and
Arnold Breit, and in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love we read of James Packer's......

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Title: Self-Enlargement In Raymond Carver's Cathedral
Approximate Word Count: 6668
Approximate Pages: 27 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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