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At the center of "Cathedral" is a significant irony: a narrator who ignorantly disdains blindness while being oblivious to his own limitations in sight. Of course, the narrator can see with his eyes but does not realize the limitations he has placed on himself, and how those prevent him from seeing or wanting anything greater in life. Included in Robert's conception of a cathedral is that the people who work on them rarely live to see their work completed. The effusive optimism of this story is a powerful end to the collection, which more often dwells in failure than hope, and in context should not be taken to reduce Carver's worldview to a celebration of the power to transcend. But it does celebrate the power that beauty and communion in the face of overpowering isolation can have, the way it can brighten our daily struggles and failures, as though to say that we must confront our isolation, loneliness and limits, continuing to work against it day-by-day even if we will, like the cathedral creators, never see our work completed.]