The Theme Of Blindness In Raymond Carter's 'Cathedral'

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Recommended: Modernism literature

“Cathedral” by Raymond Carter is a short story about a blind man who comes to visit his friend and her husband. In the story, however the husband can see and has normal vision. At the start of the story he is the one who shows signs of true blindness through his lack of ability to realize Robert beyond his blindness. The husband does not notice how Roberts’s blindness changes him as a person. Carver shows the change of the husband’s personality from being awkward around Robert than becoming aware of that the blind man is a person and not unimportant. In Raymond Carver’s ”Cathedral”, Carver brings out the idea of sacred blindness and ruined marriage to show what’s wrong with the current world.
Carver designed the husband’s background through his unknown blindness of the modern world. The husband sees his wife’s blind friend as disabled and not as a person. The narrator is not happy about the blind mans stay because it makes him feel awkward. “and his being blind bothered me. My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movie the blind move slowly and never laughed. Sometimes they were led by seeing-eye dogs. The blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to”(4). This way Carver shows how blindness can hold back people in the world today. Spiritual blind people on the other hand can’t see beyond there own physical site.
The argument Carver touched on in the “Cathedral” is the religiously blind versus the physical blind. Carver brings this into order by showing how religious blindness of today’s world looks more at the physical side rather than looking more into the topic. “one night she got to feeling lonely and cut off from people she kept losing in that moving-around life. She got to feeling she the couldn'...

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...means they’re no longer in love with each other.
To conclude, I would like to say that the story “Cathedral” is concerning our modern society. In our community, we have people that play the role of the “husband” who are facing related marriage problems. The problems that Carver covers in the story are fairly similar and related to modern society enough so it’s not just toward a single individual. On the other hand, we see human beings similar to the “blind man” who are handicapped; when in fact, they display a more accurate inspiration into everyday life and their own peers. Also they have the ability to see different things and understand other people through there own world. From the story we learn that disabled people have a better grip on understanding life. Sometimes experiencing the troubles of life helps us learn in a different way than we normally would.

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