The short stories Cathedral by Raymond Carver and A Conversation with My Father by Grace Paley, while they differ in characterization, both employ a detached narrative point of view to create an emotional experience of profound isolation in the reader. In Carver’s (2006) story, we learn the emotional isolation experienced by the narrator almost immediately, through his description of his own wife’s attempted suicide, and his description of the death of Robert’s wife. Carver’s narrator maintains a cold distance from the emotional impact of having very nearly lost his wife before he met her. Carver’s narrator seems more engaged by the competition between himself and his wife’s first husband, as evidenced herein: “one night she got to feeling lonely and cut off from people she kept losing in that moving-around life. She got to feeling she couldn’t go it another step. She went in and swallowed all the pills and capsules in the medicine chest…But instead of dying, she got sick. She threw up. Her officer–why should he have a name? he was the childhood sweetheart, and what more does he want?” (Carver, 2006). As Bullock (1994) details, in the narrator’s account of his wife’s attempted suicide, “the figures in the story—the wife, the officer, the blind man—seem a long distance away, tiny separated figures, observed by a detached, all-seeing eye. They might as well be figures on the screen of the television.” Similarly, when the narrator describes the loss of Beulah, Robert’s wife, he betrays an almost savage disregard for Robert’s emotions when he says, “Beulah’s health went into rapid decline. She died in a Seattle hospital room, the blind man sitting beside the bed and holding on to her hand. They’d married, lived and worked together, slept together–had sex, sure–and then the blind man had to bury her. All this without his having ever seen what the goddamned woman looked like. It was beyond my understanding” (Carver, 2006). Significantly, the narrator never names his wife. He identifies her only by role. This omission creates a distinct absence of personality in the woman. The narrator feels no real connection with her as a human being, aside from a mildly competitive instinct to assert his ownership over her body when she falls asleep and her robe opens in front of Robert. The point of view on display from Carver’s narrator reveals the vast emotional distance that exists between himself and other people, and he transmits and transfers this distance to us, the reader. The narrator feels nothing when describing intensely emotional events; he recounts them as though they were news. As a result, the reader’s own emotional experience comes to resemble his: muted, and disengaged. Carver’s use of point of view allows us to perceive the world from the same standoffish, sharply critical distance that the narrator does, and ironically, this brings us closer to him. The narrator in Grace Paley’s (2006) A Conversation with My Father follows a different characterization than Carver’s, however, the point of view contains the same chilled “distance between observer and observed” (Bullock, 1994). Paley’s narrator initially appears more animated, more engaged, than Car