![]() While we may not have these exact prejudices, we have others, and it’s not at all difficult to relate to the husband. In 1983 he became the first winner of Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award, and in 1984 he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His body of work isn't massive, but he did receive lots of recognition when he was alive. After all, the husband’s prejudices about blind people-they all wear dark glasses, they don’t have beards, they don’t smoke, etc.-are human attributes. Carver died at the age of fifty, in 1988, just a few years after publishing his short story collection Cathedral. While the named people represent something foreign, the unnamed may merely be stand-ins for all of us. ![]() ![]() But there’s another aspect to the namelessness of husband and wife. And Robert needs to have a name for the husband, but instead calls him “Bub,” no name at all, even though on two occasions the husband listens for Robert to use his name. ![]() The people who are very familiar to him-himself, his wife, even his wife’s first husband-are unnamed, but these strangers coming into his life, Robert and Beulah, have to be named. In fact, he thinks the name “Beaulah” sounds like a black name, and his image of Robert’s wife as possibly being black contributes to their otherness for him. Robert and Beaulah, however, are unknown to the husband, and so their names are more a part of his impression of them. ![]()
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