Analysis of Cathedral

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Encrypted within the writings of The Cathedral is a far broader and overarching theme regarding humans and their understanding of one another. Upon further analysis, I speculate that the story’s deeper message lies on the premise of individuals understanding the perspective of their counterparts. That particular topic is probably so pertinent to humanity that it goes unnoticed, and could potentially be traced to a wide variety of conflicts across history; a result of the lack of perspective we have on other people’s perspectives. The narrator assumes role as being the one who initially lacks understanding, and we will observe how this deeper message comes to fruition firstly by analyzing his pre-conceived judgments at the beginning of the piece, followed by the communicative metaphors regarding the wife and the blind man, and lastly, how the narrator’s inner realization at the end of the story is a manifestation of him realizing and understanding the perspective of another human. At the beginning of the story, the narrator sits on several assumptions regarding the blind man. He views him as someone who is lacking a significant part of life (vision), and therefore will have a certain set of attributes. The narrator even views his love life as being empty and without meaning, due to the fact that he could not gaze upon his wife. What is occurring here is the first portion of this theorized meaning within the story; the lack of awareness of another person’s perspective. The sharp, quick presumptions humans make on those that they do not understand usually fall on faulty and baseless beliefs. “I don’t know, so therefore I must assume the worst.” This is the issue that we have with our narrator. It is extended to even his wife, who has a sincere relationship with Robert, the blind man. Our narrator cannot seem to grasp as to why his wife and Robert have
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