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Literary Analysis of Cathedral by Raymond Carver
Analysis of Cathedral by Raymond Carver
Analysis of Cathedral by Raymond Carver
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Seeing Can Make You Blind Being confronted to the unknown can be challenging and unpleasant. In his short story entitled “Cathedral” Raymond Carver portrays the journey of a man’s personal thought and understanding about life. Blindness is unfamiliar for the narrator, but when his wife decides to invite the blind man she has been corresponding with for several years to their house, he has no choice but being confronted with it. The journey of the main character in this short story reveals the difference between seeing and understanding. This short story relates the experience of a sighted man receiving a blind man in his house. The narrator at the beginning of the story says that his wife's old blind friend from Seattle, who has just lost his
wife, is going to visit them. He is very unhappy about the situation because he does not have a high opinion on blind people. When Robert, the blind man, arrives, the tension between them is tangible. It is only in the late evening that the tongues start to loosen. At the end, the two men do the experience of drawing together a cathedral, which will be a revelation to the narrator. Putting himself in the blind man’s shoes helps the narrator to understand life to a higher level. Before he meets Robert, the sighted man is full of prejudices against blind people. However, things start to change when he realizes that even though they may not be able to see, blind people are not impotent and can do a lot of things like any sighted person. He starts to change, to see things differently. The experiment of the cathedral, and him being unable to describe it, brings him to the realization that seeing does not mean understanding. Seeing is in some way preventing him from thinking deeper, from being aware of his own existence and the world that surrounds him. From disregard and unawareness to consciousness and understanding, the narrator walks through a journey that is going to be life-changing for him. The visit of his wife’s blind friend, which at first seems to be a chore, turns out to be profitable. This short story emphasizes the change of the narrator’s thought. Through a simple but effective experiment, he becomes more aware of himself and life. Ultimately, the reader starts to think about those topics, which is clearly what Carver intended to do by ending up his story the way he did.
The blind man is appealing to readers because of the fact that he proves to be a good friend and listener to the narrator’s wife. The wife and blind man have kept in touch by exchanging audio tapes over the years. The wife feels comfortable sharing all aspects of her life with him. The husband expands on this by saying “She and I began going out, and of course she told her blind man about it” (5). This quote proves that the blind man provides a sense of comfort to the wife who cannot find the same sense of security in her own husband. The blind man is friendly and makes an attempt to befriend the husband even though he is consistently rude to him. The blind man tells the narrator he will stay up with him to talk even after his wife has gone to sleep. He says he feels “like me and her monopolized the evening” (83). The blind man respectfully says to the narrator “[y]ou’re my host” and wants to be fair and make sure the husband doesn’t feel left out during his visit (102). He is also very understanding and patient with the husband. This characteristic is especially proven when the narrator tries, but fails at explaining the appearance of a cathedral to the blind man. He apologizes for not doing a good job. The blind man understands and reassures him by saying “I get it, bub. It’s okay. It happens. Don’t worry about it” (110). He is aware that his
The story is about a blind man who visits a married couple. He is an old friend of the wife, but the husband does not look forward to see the blind man (called Robert) because he does not know what to expect. He has never known any blind persons and his picture of these is based on a very little foundation. He has a lot of prejudices against Robert, but during his visit he changes his opinion about him. While watching TV together they get each other to know better and the husband finds out that he actually likes his company. They watch a program about cathedrals and while talking about cathedrals, Robert says that he does not even know how a cathedral looks like. The husband tries to explain what a cathedral is and how it is built, but Robert does not understand it. Therefore he suggests that they can draw one together. In that way Robert gets a picture of a cathedral in his mind and even though it is not as good as seeing it with his own eyes, it is good enough to give him an idea of what a cathedral is.
In Cathedral by Raymond Carver, the narrator faces the conflicts of only being able to look from a standard physical viewpoint versus seeing on a deeper more involved emotional level. The story reaches a crisis when the narrator closes his eyes and begins to draw a cathedral, relying only on his imagination to fill in the details, and letting himself be guided by Robert, a blind man. This causes him to see clearly for the first time in his life on a more profound scale, even though in reality he is not actually visibly seeing anything. Therefore, the overall work argues that the narrator succeeds at meeting his challenge. He becomes more complete as a human being, since he realizes that in order to understand and view the world, one does not
Carver tells the story in first person of a narrator married to his wife. Problems occur when she wants a friend of hers, an old blind man, to visit for a while because his wife has died. The narrator's wife used to work for the blind man in Seattle when the couple was financial insecure and needed extra money. The setting here is important, because Seattle is associated with rain, and rain symbolically represents a cleansing or change. This alludes to the drastic change in the narrator in the end of the story. The wife and blind man kept in touch over the years by sending each other tape recordings of their voices which the narrator refers it to being his wife's "chief means or recreation" (pg 581).
The narrator is quite obviously the character that Carver wants us to see as figuratively "blind." There is a stark contrast in the blind man and the husband from the beginning. The story starts out as the young husband anticipates the arrival of his wife's friend. The reader can sense his disgust and unwillingness to understand what it is like to be blind. He worries only for himself and how uncomfortable he will be in the situation. Mental emphasis is placed on the physical aspects of things and how the narrator cannot understand how the blind man could have a wife and never see her. "She could, if she wanted, wear green eye-shadow around one eye, a straight pin in her nostril, yellow slacks and purple shoes, no matter" (214).
In Raymond Carver's "Cathedral," the husband's view of blind men is changed when he encounters his wife's long time friend, Robert. His narrow minded views and prejudice thoughts of one stereotype are altered by a single experience he has with Robert. The husband is changed when he thinks he personally sees the blind man's world. Somehow, the blind man breaks through all of the husband's jealousy, incompetence for discernment, and prejudgments in a single moment of understanding.
Blindness in Raymond Carver's Cathedral Blindness creates a world of obscurity only to be overcome with guidance from someone willing to become intimate with the blind. Equally true, the perceptions of blindness can only be overcome when the blind allow intimacy with the sighted. Raymond Carver, with his short story Cathedral, illustrates this point through the eyes of a man who will be spending an evening with a blind man, Robert, for the first time. Not only does this man not know Robert, but his being blind, "bothered" (Carver 98) him.
You can never seem to know what's going on in another ones life, unless you put your feet in there shoes, so to judge, is simply ignorance. Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" is a story about how the narrator is uncomfortable with having his wife's blind friend, Robert, over. Roger has lost his wife, and to cope with her death, he planned to visit the narrator's wife. Without any knowledge whatsoever on how to act in accompany towards a blind man, the narrator seems to get a glimpse of what it is to truly fit into the blind mans shoe.
The narrator, or storyteller, of Raymond Carver's short story "Cathedral" opens by saying, "This blind man, an old friend of my wife's, he was on his way to spend the night." The narrator goes on to explain that after the blind man's wife died while visiting her relatives in nearby Connecticut, he had called the narrator's wife from his in-laws' and made arrangements to visit. The narrator admits he is not excited about the visit. "He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me. My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed. Sometimes they were led by seeing-eye dogs. A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to."
“There's none so blind as those who will not listen.” – Neil Gilman. The short story “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver is about a man full of ignorance and insecurity. This tale is written in the first-person view of a husband,” Bub”, who is incapable of having a relationship with anyone. He is said to have no friends. As the story progresses he is ironically being able to see the error in his ways when his wife’s friend Robert, who is blind and makes a legitimate connection with him. In the end, Bub faces one central problem which becomes more apparent as the story continues until he has an epiphany which cured his blindness.
The story of Cathedral, by Raymond Carver, shows that you do not have to see someone or something in order to appreciate them for who or what they are. It is about a husband, the narrator, and his wife who live in a house. The wife, whose name they do not mention, has a very close friend who is blind. His name is Robert. Robert's wife dies, and comes to their house to spend a couple of days with the narrator and his wife. The narrator, whose name they do not mention as well, is always on edge because he does not really know Robert very well and he does not like blind people, but he is being friendly for his wife's sake. The story comes to an end when Robert and the narrator draw a cathedral together using the narrator's hand and helped by Robert.
In the short story, Cathedral by Raymond Carver, the narrators’ perspectives undergo massive change. The narrator of the story starts out being “blind” towards a person’s true character, and he also lacks insight and self-awareness. Ironically a blind man named Robert helps him truly see again. The narrator isn’t actually blind but he has a hard time seeing and understanding perspectives that aren’t his. But throughout the night, Robert and the narrator get to know each other and end up enjoying each other’s company. By the end of the story, the narrator finally accepts Robert for who he is, and could put his feet into Roberts shoes and the narrator learns how to truly “see” from a blind man.
In “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver, showcases the narrator's reflection and insight within himself by gaining a perspective through the eyes of Robert. In a variety of ways this story reads as a communion. Communions are usually about forgiveness and coming clean with your sins that you might of made within your past. The unnamed narrator within the story is constantly searching for forgiveness within himself. At first the narrator is a little bit wary of Robert the Blind man coming to visit his wife. The narrator is initially fearful of meeting him due to the lack of experience with blind people. He mentions that his idea of blind people has come from “movies” that he has seen
Through the first paragraphs the husband (narrator) develops many comments and short thoughts. The husband begins to generate ideas of the blind man and starts to say, “I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit...My idea of blindness came from the movies...A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to” (Carver 174). The words and the pattern of ideas are comparable to how we examine people and generate thoughts about them, especially when we first meet someone. Carver incorporates the husband’s thought process to connect with the audience, through similar
Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral” shows that you can be judgmental against the blind but for example, in the main character’s case, can turn out to be you friend too. In his story, there is a lot of evidence of how society perceives people with disabilities. The main character begins by having the ablest point of view towards his wife’s friend. However, he soon finds out through his epiphany that the “blind man” is not different than he is. This essay will argue that “Cathedral” uses the narrator’s epiphany to shows how throughout the story people can overcome their ableism point of view. The contemporary relevance of this issue is reflected in the sources “Why Do We Fear the Blind” and “Feeling My Way Through Blindness” in that it gives