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Car Crash While Hitchhiking And Cathedral Analysis

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Cathedral by Raymond Carver and Car Crash While Hitchhiking by Dennis Johnson are two non-fiction short stories that have many similarities and differences. Cathedral is a story narrated by the husband of a wife who is friends with a blind man. The wife has her blind friend come stay at their house, and the speaker is not comfortable with this, but his views change throughout the story. Car Crash While Hitchhiking is about a man in his mid-twenties that is on a lot of drugs that he receives from previous people who have let them ride with them. He wakes up in a puddle on the side of the road, and eventually a man with his family picks him up, and the end up getting into a wreck.
One similarity between these two stories is the abuse of alcohol/drugs …show more content…

In Cathedral, the speaker at first is very uncomfortable with the idea of having a blind man stay at his house. He is a very shallow person, never gives much thought to anything, and he does not try to connect to his wife on a deeper level. At the end of the story, the blind man and the speaker are alone, and the blind man asks him what a cathedral looks like. The speaker says that he cannot describe it, that he does not believe in God, so a cathedral would not have much importance to him. The blind man then has the speaker draw what a cathedral looks like, and he placed his hand on top of the speaker’s while he drew. He then asks the speaker to close his eyes and draw it, and the speaker has an epiphany, saying that he felt placeless, and was feeling like he never did before. I believe that this was him realizing the importance of understanding and empathy. However, in Car Crash While Hitchhiking, the speaker does not change throughout the story. He was on a lot of drugs in the story, and at the end the author depicts him being in some sort pf psych ward. He is hearing voices and is being handed vitamins by a nurse. It seems to me that he is in this psych ward because of his heavy use of drugs, which seems to me that he did not change by the end of the story in that

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