Alice Munro Cathedral Analysis

Many people have issues with their past and their past will come back without them knowing. This issue is what happens in the stories “The Jack Randa Hotel” and “Cathedral”. A character from both stories get jealous of their significant other being around someone that is from their past. Gail in “The Jack Randa Hotel,” writes letters to her ex husband acting like someone else then eventually, he finds out it was her. The narrator in “Cathedral” ends up becoming friends with the blind man and feels what he has to deal with every day of his life.

One issue that occurs in the story “The Jack Randa Hotel” by Alice Munro is that Gail gets extremely jealous of her ex husband, Will, and his new wife, Sandy. She remembers her life with Will being

so amazing even though they had their ups and downs. Gail decides to get on a plane to go find Will and his new wife in Australia because she has felt lonely since he left her. She misses Will so much that when she was on the plane she imagined herself talking to him like she used to. “So maybe this is the way it will be getting into Heaven,’ Gail imagines herself saying to Will. ‘People will fling flowers on you that you don’t want, and everybody will have headaches and be constipated and then you will have to be sprayed for Earth germs” (Munro 1). The reason she imagined herself talking to Will is because it was an old habit of hers. She always needed to come up with lighthearted things to say to him when she talked. Men made speeches like “I am sorry, but I no longer feel committed to this marriage.” This can reflect Gail and Will’s marriage because they were really y in love with each other until one day, Will decided to leave her. Gail and Will’s mother, Cleata, were both very close to each other and Gail loved the way that their family did things. “This is how really civilized people live. The careless and propriety combined, the response for old books and old dishes” (Munro 2). She misses everything that her and Will used to do so that is why she decided to get on a plane and go to Australia where him and Sandy now live their life together.
The first issue that occurs in the story “Cathedral,” is that the narrator gets jealous of his wife’s relationship with a blind man, Robert.

The narrator’s wife knew Robert for a long time because she used to work for him and his wife had died so she was the one who was taking care of him since he was all alone. “I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit” (Carver 2) said the narrator. The narrator did not like the blind man because he was extremely close with his wife and they were always sending each other tapes in the mail to keep in touch. Since the narrator was not such a big fan of the blind man, he did not understand why it was such a important time when Robert had asked to touch his wife’s face during her last day working with him. She was working with him all summer but he was blind so he did not even know what she looked like so when he touched her face, she wanted to write a poem about it since it was an important time during her summer job helping him. A while after the narrators wife worked with Robert, they ended up communicating again and she sent him a recording of her talking about her recent life. “She loved her husband but she didn’t like it where they lived and she didn’t like it that he was a part of the military-industrial thing” (Carver 2). The narrator was getting jealous of this relationship between the two of them because it seemed to be going better then his and his wife’s relationship. Since the blind man moved into their house for a period of time,

the narrator and his wife seemed to be fighting a bunch of times. “You don’t have any friends,’ she said. ‘Period. Besides,’ she said, ‘goddamn it, his wife’s just died! Don’t you understand that? That man’s lost his wife!” (Carver 3). After the narrator’s wife helped the blind man inside, the narrator had said “My wife finally took her eyes off the blind man and looked at me. I had a feeling she didn’t like what she saw. I shrugged” (Carver 5). At that point, the narrator was getting extremely jealous because his wife was making it seem like she liked Robert more than him.
Gail decided to make herself look different for when she got to Australia so that Will would not be able to recognize her if they bumped into each other.

She ends up walking past Will and Sandy’s new house and she spots a mailbox then decides to put her hand in it and see if there is anything that she can get that would relate to Will and his new life. A letter comes out and she puts it in her purse. She looks at it then says “It is Will’s own writing on the envelope. Not a letter to Will, then, but a letter from him. A letter he has sent to Ms Catherine Thornaby, 491 Hawtre Street” (Munro 6). Catherine had died so the letter was sent back to Will. Gail then reads the letter and decides that it is fine to write back to him as Ms. Thornaby. The letter Will had sent her the day she died, had said “You do not know me, but I hope that once I have explained myself, we may meet and talk. I believe that I may be a Canadian cousin of yours” (Munro 6). Gail was replying in very rude ways. One reply she gave him was “Did you really expect me, just because I have the same surname as you, to fling open my door and put out the ‘welcome mat’ as I think you say in America and that inevitably includes Canada? You may be looking for another mother here, but that hardly obliges me to be one” (Munro 8). In the next letter that Will send, Gail found out that his mother had died and he went back to Canada for her

funeral.
The narrator and the blind man end up becoming friends in the story. When Robert was first introduced to the narrator, he did not like him because he was jealous of the relationship he had with his wife. When the narrator's wife went upstairs to change into her robe, they were sitting there alone so the narrator asked “do you want to smoke some dope with me?” (Carver 7). Robert said he would try some. He ended up doing it a few times until it hit him. When the wife came back downstairs, she said “Robert, I didn’t know you smoked” (Carver 7). She then realized that it was his first time doing it because the narrator asked if he wanted to. They all went to the sofa to sit down and the wife sat in the middle. She ended up dozing off and falling asleep so Robert and the narrator were, then again, left alone. The blind man said “No, I’ll stay up with you, bub. If that’s all right. I’ll stay up until you’re ready to turn in. We have not had a chance to talk. Know what I mean? I feel like me and her monopolized the evening” (Carver 8). He was obviously interested in what the narrator was like since he only knew his wife very well because of their past together. He also wanted to show the narrator that he was not such a bad guy and was not trying to steal his wife away from him. They talked for a long time while sitting on the couch watching TV that the narrator started realize he was not such a bad person.
Gail was in her room and the manager knocked on the door and said “I just wanted to tell you I had somebody here asking questions. He asked me about Miss Thornaby and I said, Oh, she’s dead. She’s been dead for some time now. He said, Oh, has she? I said, Yes, she has, and he said, Well, that’s strange” (Munro 11). She ended up getting another letter from Will that reads “It has come to my attention that you are dead. I know that life is strange, but I have never found it quite this strange before. Who are you and what is going on?” (Munro 11). After she gets more letters from Will, she does not leave the apartment for two days because she did not want to fear running into Will on the streets. An old man fell off his bed so the manager went to Gail’s room to ask her for help. They got him to the hospital, but when Gail got back to her apartment room, there was a letter that she was expecting which was saying “Gail. I know it’s you” (Munro 13). She started to freak out when she saw that letter because she did not want to see him. She was going to find a flight to take her back home as soon as possible. Will was knocking on her door before she knew it. “Gail, I know you’re in there! I know you’re on the other side of the door. Gail! Gail! Talk to me, Gail. Answer me. I know you’re there. I can hear you. I can hear your heart beating through the key-hole and your stomach rumbling and your brain jumping up and down. I can smell you through the keyhole. You. Gail” (Munro 14). The three words that Gail kept thinking was “Love—need—forgive. Love—need—forever” (Munro 14). Before Gail got back on a plane to go home, she puts a note, folded up to the size of a spitball, in a box to send to Will. That letter had read “Now it’s up to you to follow me” (Munro 15).
The narrator really ended up feeling for the blind man at the end of the story. When they were both sitting on the couch while his wife was asleep beside them, the narrator turned on the TV to a different channel than what they were previously watching. It was a show on cathedrals. The narrator had asked Robert if he knew what a cathedral looked like and he said he did not. Robert wanted him to explain it, but the narrator was having a hard time doing that. The blind man said “Hey, listen to me. Will you do me a favour? I got an idea. Why don’t you find us some heavy paper? And a pen. We’ll do something. We’ll draw one together. Get us a pen and some heavy paper. Go on, bub, get the stuff” (Carver 10). Once he got back with the paper, they both sat down on the carpet and started to draw it. The narrator was drawing and the blind man had his hand over his. The wife had woken up and said “What’s going on? Robert, what are you doing? What’s going on?” (Carver 11). They explained to her what they were doing so she just watched them as they finished up. Robert said “I think that’s it. I think you got it,’ he said.’ Take a look. What do you think?” (Carver 11). The narrator wanted to keep his eyes closed for longer because he was feeling the same thing that Robert feels every day with not being able to see. The blind man kept asking him if he was looking so the narrator then said “It’s really something” (Carver 12). He really understood the way that Robert was living and why his wife was helping him out so much. He also figured out why his wife was so amazed at the little things Robert could do.
These two stories both have their past return to them in their life without them knowing. In “The Jack Randa Hotel,” Gail ends up going to Australia to where her husband lives with his new wife, and in “Cathedral,” a blind man that the narrators wife used to help during the summer, goes back to their house since his wife died. Having someones past go back to them can be a scary thought, but sometimes it is something people have to face in their lifetime.