Symbolism In Raymond Carver's Cathedral

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The narrator is told by his wife that she is having her blind friend come spend a night at their house. His wife had just passed and is a very good friend with the wife and wants the blind man to come stay with them. The narrator is not very happy about the blind man coming to visit and asks the wife where she met him and to talk more about. She explains that she worked for him, she read to him. When the blind man pulls up, the narrator is already being judgmental and prejudiced towards the blind man. He does not even the slightest open mind about meeting this man that his wife has such a good relationship with. In the story Cathedral, Raymond Carver uses metaphoric symbols, an object title, and a dialect style to get across the message that you cannot judge someone you have never met and the difference between looking and seeing things in a different perspective. The wife begins to explain to her husband that a close friend of hers is going to stay with them. She does explain how he met the blind man to her husband but that still doesn’t stop him from being jealous and judgmental. “But if you had a friend, any friend, and the friend came to visit, I’d make him feel comfortable.” The wife is expressing to her husband how she wants him to understand that she would do this for him if it was his friend coming to stay over. The narrator begins to have a mouth full of words before even meeting the blind man. The narrator explains the wife in more detail that she was married once before and was very unhappy in that relationship so unhappy that she tried to kill herself. She kept in touch with the blind man by sending back and forth tapes throughout her marriage and told everything to each other through their tapes. She kept the friendsh... ... middle of paper ... ...r to draw a cathedral. The blind man puts his hand over the narrators hand and helps him guide the pen as his hand begins to move. He gets more and more involved as his wife wakes up and asks what is going on he does not answer but just Robert just quickly tells her they are drawing a Cathedral. The narrator gets lost is his drawing feeling more free keeping his eyes closed as he is imagining what he just drew was really something. The ending of cathedral does not even seem like an ending. It leaves you with different questions, and many are unanswered. The ending adds an unexpected sense of optimism to the story. Until he draws the cathedral with the blind man, he was mainly rude and judgmental, but after he has a different perspective on life and himself. He eventually found true sight without truly looking, he scratched beyond the surface to find what lied within.

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