The Long Distance Friendship In Raymond Carver's Cathedral

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The Long Distance Friendship
The wife in Raymond Carver’s story “Cathedral” is a nice and caring character who lives her life through poetry. In addition, the wife uses poetry to express the way she feels towards important events that happens in her life. She also uses tapes to continue her long distance friendship between an old time friend who is a blind man and who she also used to work for. The wife reconnects with her old blind friend whose name is Robert, and she also invites him into to her home.
The friendship between the wife and the blind man first started in Seattle, when she had worked for him during the summer. The wife was very friendly towards robert as she helped him with court papers, organizing his office, and reading …show more content…

For example, she explains to the blind man in the tapes that she was cutting off people from her life and she tried to kill herself. However, her officer husband at the time finds her laying in the bathtub past out and calls the ambulance as a result from this she just got sick and threw up.
A third important event that happens to the wife was when she gets a divorce from her military husband. After the divorce was over she put it all onto tapes and sends it over to the blind man. Over the years the wife had a strong relationship with Robert who was an important part of her life. She told him everything about herself and what was going on in her life. Their relationship continue to develop as the years went a long by sending each other …show more content…

The tapes became very important to the wife as she continued to send tapes to Robert, in addition Robert also sent tapes to the wife explaining what was going on in his life. For example, Robert sent a tape to the wife explaining about his relationship towards a woman who he later married. Her name was Beulah. Robert explains in the tapes that he had met Beulah after the wife stopped working for him at the end of summer when she moved away from Seattle. He goes on also talking about what was going on with his wife's Beulah health problems. After of eight years of marriage Beulah, then later dies at the Seattle hospital from cancer. At that time the wife was married to Bub, who was not excited at all about a blind man whom he had never met was going to stay at his home. Bub and his wife were arguing because he didn't want him to stay over, she says “goddamn it, his wife just died! Don't you understand that? The man's lost his wife!” (95). This showed how much the wife was willing to defend Robert, she cared so much for him that she did not let anyone get in her way. She knew that Robert was feeling hurt toward his wife's death. Also, the wife didn't like it when Bub talked about Robert. Bub would talk about him and made jokes about him as well. The wife always listened to everything Robert had to say in the tapes, it was apart of her life that she didn't want to be

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