The Woman And The Blind Man In Raymond Carver's Cathedral

Recently, I read the story Cathedral by Raymond Carver and I was very fascinated by the settings of the story. It is an interesting story of a woman who invites her blind friend to her home after his wife has just died. However, their relationship is not simply a friendship, it is more complicated than it seems at a first glance and this is what I am going to demonstrate in this essay. This essay will discuss the relationship between the woman and the blind man and how the woman does not seem to care about her husband, she instead gives all her attention to the blind man. The narrator tells the story in a manner that forces the reader to reflect in a more thorough way to clearly understand what he really means or figure out the codes. As…show more content…
She told Robert: “I want you to feel comfortable in this house” (Carver 246); the woman is showing that she wants the blind man to stay in the home longer and to stay with her for a longer period of time. She even prepares his room for him. “Your bed’s made up, Robert, when you’re ready. It’s right next to our room at the top of the stairs. We’ll show you when you’re ready.” (Carver 247) When she is with the blind man, the woman is always very happy. The narrator said: “She was still wearing a smile. Just amazing.” (Carver 242). The narrator, the husband, uses the word amazing to shows that it’s something special when his wife is smiling, and now she is smiling in the presence of the blind man. It is then that it becomes noticeable that the blind man makes the woman happier than her own husband does. Later on in the story, the blind man tells a joke and the woman laughs. Her husband notices this action. Observing of the actions a woman and how she acts in the presence of other men, and actually noticing the difference is something that jealous men do. The husband is obviously not happy that the blind man makes his wife laugh more than he does while he is not even able to do so himself. At the end of the story, the woman acts very oddly when she wakes up and sees that the blind man and her husband are hand in hand and drawing the cathedral. When she says, “What are you doing? Tell me, I want to know”, “I want to know” (Carver 252) makes it seem as if she had authority over the two men and that she feels that something was going wrong that she wanted it to end. When a relationship begins, the two people usually watch each other carefully and always want to know what the other is doing, and to see if it will affect their new-born relationship. In this case, the woman might have been afraid that her husband might do something to harm the old man—or vice versa. She may have thought