The short story “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver is about a blind man named Robert whose wife has recently passed. He made a visit to spend the night with his old friend and her husband. The narrator of the story is not happy about the visit from Robert. The narrator is an insensitive, superficial, cocky middle aged man. He thinks that blind people are sad, depressing and unable to live fulfilling lives.
The opening of the story begins with a thought of the stay of a blind man, Robert. The narrator goes on to admit his discontent about the visit: “He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me” (314). In the story, it is evident that the narrator was ignorant to many facets of life. He creates a world in which he could place his thoughts, his feelings, and ultimately his innermost being.
Now, it is the narrator who feels like he is being judged. He keeps apologizing to Robert about not being able to describe the cathedrals. In the beginning of the story, the narrator feels like it is his responsibility to make Robert feel at home because Robert is blind and the narrator is considered “normal” in his own eyes. However, this idea changes when it was Robert who makes the narrator feel comfortable by laying his hand upon the narrator’s hand to draw a cathedral. The narrator was learning how to express himself by Robert’s encouragement which seems to reveal the narrator as a
English Composition 1003-10 25 September 2011 The Blind Leading the Blind After first reading Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral” one could easily get the impression that the narrator is a closed-minded jerk. After reading the story a couple more times and really considering the position the narrator is put in, I began to realize he wasn’t very closed-minded at all. He was blinded by jealousy. Because society perpetuates the idea that men must be territorial in relationships, the narrator felt that he must do anything in his power to make sure his wife was not ok with a strange man coming to his home. The narrator’s wife observes, “You don’t have any friends.
From the beginning of the story he always identified Robert as “THIS BLIND MAN” (103). He constantly talks bad about Robert for a while in the story. When Robert is over to the house the narrator immediately notices how much attention his wife is giving to him and it made him act very dry toward Robert. All was bad with the narrator and Robert in the beginning, but after a while they started talking and got to know each other a little better because after all Robert was like a stranger to the narrator. At one point the narrator’s wife became sleepy in the later parts of the night and dosed off so that led to Robert and the narrator to have alone time to bond with each other.
Test 2 Essay #1 The narrator in the “Cathedral” is metaphorically blind in the sense that he doesn’t have an insight on life or people. The narrator has fully functional vision but does not use it because he doesn’t know how to. The narrator doesn’t really care about his wife’s past and how it has affected her as a person. The narrator doesn’t understand the true pleases of life and how everything should not be looked at in the colors of white and grey but seen through all the different colors of life. In Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” the narrator has an epiphany that transforms him from alienation and loneliness to creativity and to vision.
That is why Twain criticizes those who are superstitious, because all it is is one mans word; there is no way of knowing if the event is actually related to the amount of luck an individual has. In chapter four of the novel, we see Huck worrying over bad luck, yet again. He becomes superstitious that he will have bad luck because he tipped over the salt cellar and was not able to throw a pinch of salt over his shoulder. He said, "…the Widow put in a good word for me, but that warn't going to keep off the bad luck, I knowed that well enough" (15). Again we see Huck worrying that he will have serious bad luck ,in the future, because of something minor that happened in the present.
Nick describes himself as being someone who reserves all judgment but, throughout the novel he is constantly relaying his opinion about other people. Nick makes a comment about his cousin Daisy’s husband Tom and says, “The fact that he “had some women in New York” was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book.” Nick is blatantly insulting Tom, and
The Narrator had high expectations of Robert the blind man being “slow” and not “humorous”. When the blind man arrived the narrator could not believe it. “The blind man, feature this, he was wearing a full beard! A beard on a blind man! Too much, I say” (Paragraph 19).
Michael Hyatt Dr. Tuttle English 250 7 October 2014 Personal Response: Cathedral by Raymond Carver I really enjoyed the short story by Raymond Carver called “Cathedral”. The short story is generally about a blind man coming to visit a women and her husband. In the beginning of the story the husband to me seems to be the one that is blind. By observing how the husband acted and speaks to Robert, the blind man, I could see that the husband seemed to be very uncomfortable and misunderstanding of Robert and his condition. The husband struggles with trying to figure out what to do or say around Robert.