Analysis Of Raymond Carver 's ' Cathedral '

In Cathedral, by Raymond Carver, a blind man guides the narrator towards an epiphany: he needs to see situations and people in a deeper way, rather than just from a materialistic point of view. In the beginning of the story, the narrow-minded speaker is originally opposed to having the blind man, Robert, stay in his home. Because the narrator realizes that there is a nothingness in his life, he eventually grows to admire Robert’s ability to have faith in people, relationships, and the world even though he cannot see. When the narrator closes his eyes while the two men are drawing a cathedral, his spiritual growth in the story becomes apparent to the reader and to himself because he notices that by drawing with such passion, he has begun to

The narrator’s lack of imagination leads him to reject what is beyond his visual perception. The narrator looks at his surroundings plainly as they are and therefore fails to see the deeper meanings behind it. Throughout the story, the narrator is watching television, which symbolizes his narrow perspective and his failure to observe the world on his own. His “idea of blindness came from the movies” (Carver 315) and this preconceived notion results in his unenthusiastic attitude towards Robert before

In Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral”, the short story is told by a character within the story. The first-person point of view gives us a transparent visual of an important time in the narrators’ life. The narrator, who is “un-named” in the beginning of the story, uses blunt, flawless and a particular choice of words. This gives us as the reader a deeper connection with the narrator. The narrator begins this story by taking us through the changes he go through with the uneasy feeling of having a blind-man coming to his house to visit.

He makes this clear in the opening paragraph of the story where he says “I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me. My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed. Sometimes they were led by seeing-eye dogs. A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to” (Carver 1). The narrator dismisses Robert in the same manner a white racist may dismiss an African-American. His prejudice, or any prejudice, is preconceived based on superficial qualities rather than actual experience or reason. It is evident the narrator can’t see beyond Robert’s disability and is judging Robert because of a characteristic that makes him uncomfortable. This unconscious placement of Robert into an atypical category prevents him from seeing Robert as an individual. The narrator does not see Robert as a whole person, but solely as a blind man. Part of what makes the narrator emotionally blind is this

I enjoyed reading “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver. The story is realistic, relatable, and meaningful. The main protagonist, Bub, is arrogant and superficial. Because of Robert’s intimate relationship with his wife, he does not like the blind man. To cover up the fact that he is jealous, he states that he never had a blind man in his house before and that Robert does not have the characteristics he thought blind people have. Robert does not wear glasses, has a beard and etc. On page 90 he says, “I always thought dark glasses were a must for the blind.” This shows that even before he met Bub, he already had some preconceived picture of Bub that hinders him from really getting to know the real Bub. However, towards the end of the story he seems

In “The Cathedral” by Raymond Carver, a man named Robert is coming to spend the night at the narrator’s house. Robert is a friend of the narrator’s wife who happens to be blind, which doesn’t sit well with the narrator. Robert and his wife have a ten year relationship which started with her working for him. Since then they’ve stayed in contact by sending audiotapes to each other. When Robert reaches the house, the narrator is a bit uncomfortable. The first reason being because the man is blind, and secondly he’s not really sure what to say to a man who has a past with his wife. Soon after, the narrator sees that Robert isn’t initially what he thought the man would be like. Robert’s suggestion for the narrator to close his eyes while drawing the cathedral creates a different perspective for him, which allows him to realize it is he who is limited and cannot see, not Robert.

The narrator from Raymond Carver’s ‘Cathedral’, lived a clouded state of mind where his thoughts kept him from reaching the pellucid reality. Through the beginning of the narrative, the narrator expresses his harsh and judgmental opinions about blindness- which represents his incapacity and closed-mindedness to see beyond him. Later on his perspective is changed thanks to a sudden events. The narrator, which has no given name, is bothered by the impending visit of his wife’s blind friend, Robert. The narrator’s wife used to work for Robert from which they developed a relationship and inspired the wife to write poems about it. They, the wife and Robert, have maintained a constant communication through mailed tapes. All of these added up more to the narrator’s dislike for Robert. For example, when the narrator express his desconstest towards Robert’s disability: “And his being blind bothered me. My idea of blindness came from the movies” (‘Cathedral’, Raymond Carver). Here the narrator’s narrowness and lack of sympathy is palpable. He is simple and superficial. Lives in a 2D way, is incapable of bearing a thought outside the box, and explore the depths of life in general. He is unhappy with his current work position but does nothing to change that fact. That’s until Robert’s visit. This is changed once the narrator gets to know Robert and Robert opens the narrator’s mind to life seen through another pair of eyes. For instance, after dinner is over, the narrator and Robert are watching a documentary about cathedrals. Suddenly, the narrator wonders if Robert has any knowledge of how cathedrals look like. There is where their journey begins. Robert ask to the narrator to draw a cathedral for him and request the narrator to add specific details (people, etc.). “So we kept on it. His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over

In the beginning, the narrator was reluctant to allow the blind man to come to his house. The narrator’s perception about the blind man comes from the movies he saw, and this preconception influences the narrator’s contempt of the blind man in his house. For instance, the narrator says in the story that, “I was not

The narrator first looks at the blind man as just a blind man, he didn’t refer to him as Robert, didn’t think that he would be able to do much on his own, and that he most likely wasn’t very knowledgeable. The narrator greatly changed his personal outlook on the Robert when he saw the Robert eating at the dinner table with ease. He was moving as if he knew where everything on his plate was. In a scene at the dinner table the narrator was thinking to himself and said in his mind, “I watched with admiration as he used his knife and fork on the steak.” (Carver 110) This was a turning point for the narrator’s outlook on Robert. After this scene, the narrators outlook on him

Cathedral is a capitivating story based on the lives of the narrator, his wife and a blind man. Raymond Carver is the author of this story, and he does an excellent job allowing the reader to delve into the lives of these characters. Through using the thoughts of the narrator, the reader is able to grab our attention because the story is made more realistic. The views expressed by the narrator in many senses exemplify the views of many in society and therefore the reader is able to make an emotional connection through the story.

Although, the narrator struggles with the misunderstandings behind his wife’s and the blind man’s relationship it becomes apparent that Robert was in fact married. The narrator is proven to have jealous thoughts and a biased opinion of what blind people are like, but he realizes that Robert was now widowed and has lost a woman that “never [saw] herself as she was seen in the eyes of her loved one” (Carver 458). Robert was the “husband [that] could never read the expression on her face, be it misery or something better” (458). These revelations are just a few that possibly help the narrator start to feel some comfort behind the upcoming visit.

“Cathedral”  is a short story by Raymond Carver. The narrator is the principal character. He has a negative personality. His wife is sincere, compassionate and a little controlling person. Robert is a secondary character.

In the beginning of the story, the husband, who is the narrator of “Cathedral,” seems to be a very ignorant, uncaring man. Nesset wrote “Walled in by his own insecurities and prejudices, this narrator is sadly out of touch with his world and with himself, buffered by drink and pot and by the sad reality, as his wife puts it, that he has no ‘friends’” (Nesset 124). The narrator has no connection to himself or the outside world. He has no friends, as his wife points out, which goes to show he keeps to himself, but he still doesn’t fully understand who “himself” is, because he doesn’t have that connection to himself, thus leading to the drinking and drugs. He wasn’t used to change, so having a visitor come over to his house bothered him. The moment he saw Robert, the narrator began to change. When his wife pulled up with the blind man in the car and they got out of the car, he saw that Robert had a beard and he thought to himself, “This blind man, feature this, he was wearing a full beard! A beard on a blind man! Too much, I say” (Carver 35). The narrator had expected to see the blind man in the way they showed them in the movies, but now that his idea of who Robert was as a person was being challenged, the change started to appear. Robert, who is a static character, is very essential in the change of the narrator. It is because Robert is the way he is, his marrying of a colored woman, his travels around the

The short story “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver is told from the perspective of a first-person narrator. Throughout the story, the narrator is self-absorbed in his own thoughts and emotions and fails in his willingness to overlook personal insecurities in order to accommodate others’ discomfort, i.e. predominantly his wife and the blind man. In general, the story lacks figurative language and is told in short, direct sentences. This basic structure leaves a lot for the reader to interpret on his or her own. I focused on two paragraphs within Raymond Carver’s short story. The first section is the fifth paragraph in the story beginning with “But instead of dying...” and concluding with “all I wanted to.” To make it less complicated throughout my paper, I will refer to this segment as ‘Section 1.’ The second section I used is the seventh paragraph in the short story, which begins with “Beulah had gone to work...” and ends with “Pathetic.” I will refer to this segment as ‘Section 2.’ Both of these paragraphs hold significance both in themselves alone as well as when applied together.

As the story continues it exposes the many things that the husband fails to realize. For example, the husband neglects to recognize that Robert can feel. Robert commented about the train ride from the city that he’d "nearly forgotten the sensation" (1055). The husband does not understand that what blind people cannot see they can experience by feeling and hearing. The husband does not see what is underneath the skin or what is behind a face. The husband sees people and things at face value; he doesn’t look beneath the surface. In contrast, the blind man "sees" things with his ears, his hands, and his heart. Robert does not let the fact that he is handicapped affect how he perceives people and the things around him. Carver illustrates this when the husband observes, "The blind man has another taste of his drink. He lifted his beard, sniffed it, and let it fall. He leaned forward on the sofa. He positioned his ashtray on the coffee table, then put the lighter to his cigarette. He leaned back on the sofa and crossed his legs at the ankles" (1057) He did this just as anyone could have done. He doesn’t let the fact that he is