Marriages

As I continue to read through Cathedral, I notice how three out of three stories I have read include some sort of odd, malfunctioning marriage. Feathers is about a weird family, as I previously discussed in my blog. Chef´s House is about a couple divorced over the man´s drinking problem who move into a cabin for a while when he said he is clean and done with treatment. The third one, Preservation, talks about a man who lost his job and his wife suffers because he does nothing else but sit on his couch and watch T.V. "Why this motif?", I asked to myself. "Why can´t he write about children, or friends, or anything that does not include an unhappy couple?". Knowing that many authors write on what they know, I looked up Carver´s biography just to check that he had not been through a series of failed marriages and was losing faith in love. What I found was that I was right, many of his stories have been based on similar experiences. Just like the wife in Preservation, he had to go through a series of annoying jobs to support his family, finding their condition often miserable and having to struggle. When his career as a writer kicked off, so did his drinking problem and soon had to join Alcoholics Anonymous, but not before losing his wife. Just like the drunk in Chef´s House, he too went to a cabin and hid himself for some while, taking a female friend along. The resemblances are many, and I don´t doubt that the largest part are soon to come. For now, I´ll begin to look for the hidden Carver character in every one of his stories.