Sonny's Blues And Cathedral Analysis

After reading Sonny’s Blues and Cathedral by James Baldwin and Raymond Carver respectively, it is easy to distinguish similarities and differences when comparing them to the other stories previously read. We discussed in class the structures, settings, forms and themes of these stories, in which we often found imprisonment was a recurring topic. On the contrary, the two stories assigned for Thursday differ from the others in some aspects like the narrator, style and some themes.
Almost all the stories we had read throughout the semester reflect the conflict within a character. Some of them are physically imprisoned as the woman in The Yellow Wallpaper, others are confined in their own prejudices and emotional lives like the narrator in Cathedral and in Sonny’s Blues or the
While most of the prior stories have a third person as a narrator, Sonny’s Blues and Cathedral are written in first person which gives us a limited view of what is really happening. The readers only have access to the knowledge the narrator has but are incapable of discovering what the other characters’ intension and feelings are. I really liked these two stories because I consider they were written in a truly beautiful way and contrary to the others gave a message of understanding, redemption and hope. Like the narrator in Cathedral expressed “It was like nothing else in my life up to know”, in that moment he understood someone else- the blind man- for the first time and that feeling made him grow as a person. Furthermore, in Sonny’s Blues this quote describes that urge for someone to be listened, to be understood: “Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.” These books convey us how we need to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes to truly understand others and learn more about