Turn A Blind Eye In Raymond Carver's Cathedral

Turn a Blind Eye

In Raymond Carver’s short story, “Cathedral”, the narrator’s ignorance and apathetic perspective of blindness is shaken when he makes a connection with a blind man, which allows him to see for the first time. We will examine how Carver’s choice of first-person point of view gives us a depiction of the narrator’s traits through his tone of voice while encountering Robert, the blind man and the irony of blindness that the narrator himself faces through his lack of understanding until his self-realization at the end of the story.

Carver’s use of first-person point of view helps us gain an illustration of the narrator and how selfishly self-centered he is towards the arrival of this blind man staying in his home. Regardless of

the blind man’s situation, the narrator sees this as an inconvenience saying, “A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to.” (105). The narrator has this preconceived notion to him that the blind are a hassle as if the blind man was incapable of taking care of himself. Trapped in this delusional mindset the narrator constantly judges from knowledge he has that are false. When his wife and Robert arrive from the depot, the narrator describes the blind man’s appearance and is bewildered when he notices that the blind man does not have glasses covering his eyes saying, “I’d always thought dark glasses were a must for the blind.” (108). The narrator reveals to us his ideas of the blind are how it should be, his surprised realization of reality makes him wish that he actually did have some on. Furthermore, the narrator is often caught deceiving himself in a way that reveals to us how biased, ignorant, and insensitive he is.