In Carver's "Cathedral," is the narrator connected with his wife?

This is an interesting question. There is evidence
inferred from what the narrator and his wife say to each other that indicates they are
not, in fact, connected to each other--perhaps both have an inability to connect; the
wife’s inability may be revealed in the events of her first marriage. It is clear,
however, that the narrator is attached to his wife and feels deeply for
her.

This attachment is revealed in several circumstances,
for instance, in the way he always refers to his wife as “my wife.” This may be thought
of as a means to put some distance between them and to insulate their mutual states of
separateness and isolation. On the other hand, the possessive pronoun “my” indicates
attachment, a welcome acknowledgement of relatedness and of interdependence. There is no
hostility in the tone of nor in the contexts in which the narrator says “my wife,”
therefore the inference is that their relatedness and interdependence is of an
affectionate nature--a positive attachment--instead of a hostile nature. The best
confirmation of this is when he sees her get out of the car when bringing Robert to
their home. He then makes his only personal comment on her: he says, “She was still
wearing a smile. Just amazing.”

What textual evidence shows that,
while attached to her, the narrator is or is not connected to her? The most dramatic
evidence for the contention that the narrator is  not connected to her is that she
becomes vehement, with little or no justifiable provocation--unless it be provocation
accumulated around many subjects over the years--while discussing how to welcome her
friend and then while expressing the reality of Robert’s situation, doing so probably
not for the first time:

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You don’t have any friends. …
Period.
[His] wife’s just died! Don’t you understand that? The man’s lost his
wife!

Two other pieces of
textual evidence occur during their visit with Robert. The first is the way they
hungrily ate their meal with single-minded dedication without even any consideration of
conversation; meal-time ease and conversation are traditionally thought to be indicators
of the connectedness of the parties sharing the meal
together:

We
dug in. We ate everything there was to eat on the table. We ate like there was no
tomorrow. We didn’t talk. We ate. We scarfed. We grazed the table. We were into serious
eating.

The second is the way
his wife looks at him when, during the visit, he turns the television on. The narrator
recounts that “My wife looked at me with irritation. She was heading toward a boil.”
When trying to deduce the narrator’s connectedness to his wife, it is helpful to note
that he is a reliable narrator; his bitter and resentful tone and attitude are as
unsparing to himself as to the other two characters. In summary, the evidence appears to
indicate that while the narrator is deeply attached to his wife, he is not connected to
her, though part of the cause may be her own inability to connect, as is illustrated by
her feelings in her first marriage: “She got to feeling she couldn’t go it another
step.”