Spiritual Rebirth in Modern American Literature
Even though they both come from modern American literature, Raymond
Carver’s “Cathedral” and Philip Roth’s “Defender of the Faith” are very different
stories. Their narrators come from different backgrounds. Their writing styles are
wildly different. Still, they share a common thread. In both of these stories, the main
character goes through something of a spiritual awakening.
In “Cathedral,” the blind man asks the narrator if he is in any way religious,
and the narrator responds, “I guess I don’t believe in it. In anything. Sometimes it’s
hard. You know what I’m saying?” (1499) Then he says, “Truth is, cathedrals don’t
mean anything special to me. Nothing. Cathedrals. They’re something to look at on
late-night TV. That’s all they are.” So the narrator isn’t religious. We probably could
have guessed this already, based on the previous scene at the dinner table. When the
narrator suggests that they pray before eating, the wife is surprised, meaning they
don’t usually pray. Then, the prayer he gives is clearly a joke. “Now let us pray…pray
the phone won’t ring and the food doesn’t get cold.” He is being clever and lighthearted. Maybe to put the guest at ease, maybe to portray himself in a positive
light—it hardly matters. We are being told that the man would never pray before
eating a meal. So, when the narrator tells us that he isn’t religious, we aren’t
surprised. The new piece of information is that cathedrals carry no personal
significance for him. Since Carver tells us this as a separate fact, this must somehow
be separately significant. He is separating cathedrals from religion.
The blind man responds by asking if the narrator will draw him a cathedral.
“Get us a pen and some heavy paper,” he says, “Go on, bub, get the stuff.”
Surprisingly, and perhaps for the first time in the entire story, the narrator does not
say something cheeky. He doesn’t even ask why. He even goes to some considerable
effort emptying the bag of onions to use it for paper.
When he gets back, he begins to draw the cathedral. Walls, spires, roof, etc.
The blind man says, “You’re doing fine…Never thought anything like this could
happen in your lifetime, did you, bub?” This is significant in that before, when they
were watching the cathedrals on the television, it said, “The men who began their
life’s work on them, they never lived to see the completion of their work” (1565). So
the narrator drawing a sketch of a cathedral is being compared to the actual
construction of a cathedral. Something, then, is being created.
Again, the blind man says the encourages the narrator, says, “Put some
people in there now. What’s a cathedral without people?” When he does, the blind
man pushes him farther. He asks the narrator to close his eyes. When he does, he
asks him to keep drawing. The narrator says, “So we kept on with it. His fingers rode
my fingers as my hand went over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to
now.”
The blind man tells him to take a look, and the narrator does, but he keeps
his eyes closed. He runs his hands over the picture instead. Here, he has an
experience, a moment of personal realization, but Carver doesn’t spell it out for us. It
says, “My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I
was inside anything. ‘It’s really something,’ I said.”
Not surprisingly, Carver doesn’t spell out what the narrator’s experience
really is. The narrator might be sarcastic when he says, “It’s really something,” but I
doubt it. Yes, it would be within the narrator’s character, as we have come to see
him, but I think he really is having some sort of spiritual experience. Mostly because,
he must have found this moment profound enough to write it down. In the
beginning, the narrator makes fun of his wife for trying to write the poem about the
blind man touching her face. Then, the narrator has a similar experience and an
identical response. The blind man touches him; he writes about it. So, even though
the narrator is very capable of sarcasm, I don’t think he’s using it here. He’s
genuinely experiencing some sort of spiritual change or realization.
Philip Roth’s narrator in “Defender of the Faith” goes through a similar
religious awakening. In the beginning of the story, we discover that Sergeant Marx is
Jewish when private Grossbart corners him. He says, “M-A-R-X, isn’t that how you
spell it, Sergeant?” He’s saying that the spelling is Jewish and is asking if Sergeant
Marx is indeed Jewish. But the Sergeant seems unwilling to tell. “The young man had
managed to confuse himself as to what my faith really was, but I felt no desire to
straighten him out” (Baym 1496) On page 1497, though, we do discover what the
Sergeant’s faith is:
“Damn it, Grossbart, stop whining. You have your rights. You can stay and
scrub floors or you can go to shul—“
The smile swam in again. Spittle gleamed at the corners of his mouth. “You
mean church, Sergeant.”
“I mean shul, Grossbart!”
So the Sergeant is a Jew—and, we might infer, a relapsed or reluctant Jew. As
he tells us on page 1499, “I could hear Grossbart singing the double-time cadence,
and as it grew dimmer and dimmer it suddenly touched some deep memory…In fact,
I indulged myself to a reverie so strong that I felt within as though a hand had
opened and was reaching down inside. It had to reach so very far to touch me.” And
then when the Sergeant is at shul, he says, “…then everyone sang ‘Ain Kelohanoh,’
after all those years I discovered I still knew the words.”
Although the narrator in “Cathedral” and the narrator of “Defender of the
Faith,” are of different religions, they are both in a similar place, spiritually, when
their stories begin. They simply aren’t religious. But, they are tied to the customs:
Sergeant Marx associates religion with his childhood; and Roth’s unnamed narrator
associates Cathedrals with great toil, but no personal significance. Just as Roth’s
narrator has something of a revelation, so does Sergeant Marx.
When private Grossbart writes a letter complaining about the food, Sergeant
Marx is forced to resolve the matter. He goes to talk to Grossbart:
“…I used my name, my father’s name, but it’s Mickey and Fishbein too I’m
watching out for.”
“You’re a regular Messiah, aren’t you?”
We were at the chow line now.
“That’s a good one, Sergeant.” He smiled. “But who knows? Who can tell?
Maybe you’re the Messiah…a little bit. What Mickey says is the Messiah is a
collective idea. He went to Yeshivah, Mickey, for a while. He says together we’re the
Messiah. Me a little bit, you a little bit…You should hear that kid talk, Sergeant, when
he gets going.”
“Me a little bit, you a little bit. You’d like to believe that, wouldn’t you,
Grossbart? That makes everything so clean for you.”
“It doesn’t seem too bad a thing to believe, Sergeant. It only means we should
all give a little, is all…”
I walked off to eat my rations with the other noncoms.
This paragraph is the heart of the story. The lynchpin, the thesis, the
metaphor. This is where Sergeant Marx is introduced to the idea of the collective
Messiah. Sergeant Marx is a reflective man. He thinks about this. He is thinking
about this when Grossbart asks him for the weekend pass, so he can go visit his Aunt
for Yom Tov. Sergeant Marx eventually says yes, and also gives two passes for
Fishbein and Mickey. The boys say they will bring Sergeant Marx a piece of gefilte
fish, a traditional Jewish food. He is satisfied.
When the boys return, though, Grossbart gives him a Chinese eggroll. They
didn’t go to his Aunt’s house. She wasn’t expecting him at all. So, when Sergeant
Marx hears that Grossbart is not being sent to the Pacific with the rest of his platoon,
he decides to do something about it. He calls C & A and straightens things out. He
resets the roster and has Grossbart sent to the Pacific, like he was supposed to.
When Grossbart confronts him, he says:
“You owe me an explanation!” He stood in my path.
“Sheldon, you’re the one who owes explanations.”
He scowled. “To you?”
“To me, I think so, yes. Mostly to Fishbein and Halpern.”
“That’s right, twist things around. I owe nobody nothing, I’ve done all I could
do for them. Now I think I’ve got the right to watch out for myself.”
“For each other we have to learn to watch out, Sheldon. You told me that
yourself.”
“You call this watching out for me, what you did?”
“No. For all of us.”
So Sergeant Marx thinks he is doing the right thing. Though he knows it was a
vindictive move, getting Grossbart’s orders changed, he did it for the rest of the
Jews. Sergeant Marx is acting as the collective Messiah. He has moved from being a
reluctant Jew to an active, avant-garde Jew. He accepts his fate, believing he is acting
within his Jewish faith.
Like Carver’s narrator in “Cathedral,” then, Sergeant Marx has his own
spiritual awakening. Although these experiences happen to very different men,
under very different circumstances, there’s a common theme. Spiritual latency and
rebirth are incredibly important in modern American literature. It’s a trope we see
often and it speaks volumes about our culture and our values. That these two stories
share that trope is no coincidence, because they come from a shared, American
culture.