In Raymond Carver’s story, “Cathedral,” we meet the nameless protagonist who is about to meet an old friend of his wife’s. The friend’s name is Robert and he is blind. In the beginning of the story, the narrator is uncomfortable with the idea of having someone with a disability, like Robert’s, in his home. He makes judgments about Robert and assumes that he is going to be like the blind people he has seen in the movies. We also learn the background information about how hife wife and Robert met and became friends. This story is a metaphor for not making blind judgements off of people before you get to know them. The reader learns about why Robert is coming to visit in the first paragraph. The narrator is extremely uncomfortable with the …show more content…
They became fast friends after that. Later on in the paragraph, the narrator talks about how on his wife’s last day working with Robert, Robert asked if he could touch her face. The narrator says, “She told me he touched his fingers to every part of her face, her nose--even her neck!” (20). The narrator sounds disgusted by this. He’s shocked that she would let a man just touch her face, let alone a blind man. However, it also sounds like he is a bit jealous too. This is another example of the narrator not understanding Robert’s disability and what he does to understand what something looks like. Robert probably did this because he wanted to what his friend looked like. He wanted to be able to picture her so he could remember her.
The next three paragraphs talk about what happened to the wife in between leaving Robert and meeting the narrator. The wife married her childhood sweetheart and spent years travelling around to different bases because her husband was an Air Force officer. Robert and her had kept in contact and they would send tapes to each other, talking about what was happening in their life. One day the wife felt so lonely from losing people because she was always moving, that she decided to overdose. She ended up getting really sick, but in time she made another tape telling Robert what had happened. The tapes in this story are extremely important for a couple reasons.
The narrator has perfectly acceptable vision, he can see his wife, and he can see and describe Robert: “this blind man, feature this, he was wearing a full beard! A beard on a blind man! Too much, I say” (181). He
In Cathedral, the unnamed narrator, husband, defines the character of Robert as an anomaly in which he doesn’t comprehend. “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 1983). The media has been able to lead people like the narrator to develop negative opinions towards those with disabilities creating a type of phobia. After hearing stories about Robert, told by his wife, he could not imagine this blind man having a good life, one worth living. He assumes that Robert’s wife, Beulah, had lived a very pitiful life as well, not having her husband ever knowing what she looked like or what subtle nuances her facial expressions could only show through sight.
He is always focused on his wife, and even though it is not his ideal of a perfect marriage he does seem to love and admire his wife as if it was. He is capable of telling us a lot of details about his wife without ever calling her out or even trying to persuade us to dislike her. His love for her makes it possible for the narrator to get past his dislike of Robert, and allow him to stay in his house. Even after all the dislike he shares with us in the very beginning of the story. He comes into the kitchen to talk to his wife, and tries his best to be a nice guy about the topic of the blind guest which is a much different view from earlier. This persuades us to look at the narrator in his wife's perspective, even though we have knowledge that she doesn't about the narrators anxiety over Robert. Another large detail we have over the wife is that the narrator is jealous of Robert and is just using his blindness as a scapegoat. However, even though this extreme case of jealousy is unhealthy for their relationship, the narrator, in his own way, tells his wife he loves her. When his wife tells him "If you love me... you can do this for me. If you don't love me, okay." he does exactly that and tries to make Robert comfortable (Carver 107).
This story was written in the first-person perspective. More specifically, the story is a dramatic monologue in which the narrator is responding to ambiguous questions asked by an ambiguous character. The narrator is a major participant taking part in the story as she is the main character, but she isn’t necessarily a reliable source of information because of her extremely emotional state of mind. She is repressing memories from the night of the incident and from her life in general, and this is shown when she says, “I hate to repeat it, my life” (41), and “I don’t want to talk about her” (43). The narrator is also highly unreliable because she isn’t even certain of the validity of the story she is telling. She says, “What? Did I say that?...Then maybe I do remember it, it’s all so confusing and…” (45). Because this story is first-person, we can know only what the narrator reveals. We don’t know the questions being asked of the narrator or the response of that person, and the narrator doesn’t always finish her sentences or thoughts, either. She drifts off and this is shown by the abundant use of ellipses. This is when the reader starts to speculate what is being left out of the narration. The narrator is repressing memories and refusing to talk about them, like when she says, “I don’t want to talk about it again” (41), so there is some
Throughout Robert’s visit, the narrator makes snide and insensitive remarks, despite his wife’s wishes. His misunderstanding of relationships and people is his visible flaw. It isn’t until the narrator
The narrator is pre-judgemental towards all people who are blind, whether or not he has met them. He believes all blind people are the same as those he has watched in movies. The narrator perception of the blind is that they “moved slowly and never laughed” and when they went out “they were led by seeing eye-dogs” (Carver 104). The movie industry creates a false image of the blind, which leads to the narrator’s assumptions. However, the blind are not all the same, just like how everyone else in the world are not the same. People are designed to be different in their personalities, thoughts, looks and much more. The narrator’s ideas of Robert are based off of false conceptions and this changes his attitude towards Robert. The narrator already has strong feelings towards Robert before meeting him
By the end of Raymond Carver's "Cathedral," the narrator is a round character because he undergoes development. The story opens with the narrator's unconcern for meeting the blind man, Robert, which is because he was uninvolved in the friendship between the blind man and the narrator's wife. Feeling intimidated, he discloses, "I wasn't enthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me" (Carver 1). This emphasizes the narrator's unwillingness to bond with the blind man, which is made visible as the story progresses; moreover, he does not acknowledge their relationship. This is highlighted when he mentions what the name of the blind man's wife was. "Her name was Beulah. Beulah! That's a name for a colored woman. 'Was his wife a Negro?' I asked" (3). He seems disgusted with people. The insensitive narrator's prejudice is evident by him saying, "I've never met, or personally known, anyone who was blind" (5). This statement causes the audience to expect growth in him. The narrator's detachment from the blind man is indicated by his disinterest in cathedrals and tapes; nevertheless, the blind man and the narrator have had dinner, "smoked dope," and drank together,
The husband first begins to open up to Robert when he watches with "admiration" as the blind man eats his food. He begins to see Robert as an independent man that has learned to live life despite his disability. There is a moment of connection when they all three finally begin the meal and he describes them as if they were all the same, eating the same way, intently and "seriously" (351). The husband asks to share a joint with Robert when his wife is not present, showing an indication of trust or maybe cockiness (352). Though shocked of her husband's actions, the wife joins in when she returns. When the wife has passed out between them, he commences to enjoying Robert's presence. When Robert wishes to stay up with him, listening to the television, the husband makes the
As soon as the story begins, we are told that the narrator is not happy about the upcoming visit from his wife’s blind friend, Robert. The narrator states “I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit,” “[Robert] being blind bothered me”, and “a blind
The narrator's wife said, “If you love me, you can do this for me. If you don’t love me okau. But, if you had a friend, any friend, and the friend came to visit, I’d make him feel comfortable” (Carver, 142). When the idea of a person different than the narrator he became uncomfortable. He decided he knew Robert before he met him based on the images of the blind in the movies.
The notion of possessing an intrinsic bias is introduced in Raymond Carver’s Cathedral. He highlights how perception can affect the way people interact and communicate with each other for the first time. In the short story, the narrator himself is blind to the emotions of the people around him and eschews any form of self-reflection until the very end. He is envious of the blind man, who shares an intimate relationship with the narrator’s wife. However, the blind man is depicted as insightful and personal. Carver discloses in Cathedral that Robert, the blind man, and the narrator’s wife had been exchanging audiotapes for years, sharing their experiences and difficulties with one another.
Throughout the middle of the story, the narrator is discriminatory towards blind people but suddenly feels the need to make Robert feel comfortable just because it will please his wife. The narrator and his wife were in the kitchen talking, and then the wife says “If you love me, you can do this for me. If you don’t love me, okay. But if you have a friend, any friend, and the friend came to visit, I’d make him feel comfortable” (116). To show that her husband is still prejudice towards blind people, he replies and says “I don’t have any blind friends” (116) which gets his wife upset because Robert is her friend. When the narrator says that he does not have any
This seems to unsettle the husband, as he notices that his wife has a stronger connection with Robert than they have in their marriage. The husband is blind to his wife’s feelings and needs in their relationship, and this lack of communication between them has affected their marriage. His wife wrote a poem about her experience with the blind man touching her face, and he brushed it off by stating that, “[He] can remember not thinking much about the poem” (33). The blind man however acts as an outlet for the wife to vent about her feelings which forms a close bond between the two. Robert can understand the speaker’s wife in a way that the speaker clearly is not able to. The narrator mentions that he believes Robert’s wife, Beluah, must have led a miserable life because she, “could never see herself as she was seen in the eyes of her loves one. A woman who could never go on day after day and never receive the smallest compliment from her beloved” (34). He believes that the blind man’s wife must have suffered due to his inability to see her, yet the narrator has never even truly seen his own wife. Robert’s friendship with the speaker’s wife is what his own marriage is lacking due to not being able to recognize that his wife needs an emotional connection with him.
Raymond Carver’s characters were considered to be very much like him: “’on the edge: of poverty, alcoholic self-destruction, loneliness” (Mays 32). His short story “Cathedral” is about a young couple, who have a visitor coming to stay with them. This visitor, Robert, is the wife’s friend, and he is blind. The narrator, the husband, has never met someone who is blind, was bothered by that. To him, being blind meant constantly needing help from others. His depiction of blindness was what he has seen in the movies. “I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit… A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to,” he tells the reader (Carver 32). His wife on the other hand, was very happy to see her old friend. She had worked for Robert
Through the author's use of diction, more aspects of the narrator's personality are revealed. Simply from word choice, we learn that the narrator is prejudicial towards others, and jealous of other men's relationships with his wife. When facing the situation of Robert coming to town to visit his wife, the narrator blatantly expresses that "a blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to" (Carver 209). This repeated substitution of "blind man"