In both short stories, “Cathedral” written by Raymond Carver and “A Good Man is Hard to Find” written by Flannery O’Connor, we encounter characters that have a limited perspective on life. We find that the unnamed narrator in “Cathedral” has a bias mindset towards the blind man, Robert before he even meets and gets to know him. While in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the grandmother is ignorant of her surroundings while being oblivious to her own flaws. Both stories demonstrate the overcoming of blindness through prejudice and vanity to end up seeing something greater than themselves through the use of characterization, symbolism, and epiphanies. In “Cathedral,” the narrator’s wife invites her blind friend, Robert, to stay in their home
From that moment, the narrator show his true side to me. It shows that he doesn’t not care about his wife feeling toward the blind man. After carefully reading “cathedral”, the narrator is jealous of the blind man relationship with his
The Difference Between Looking And Seeing: What The Last Scene in Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” Really Means In the last scene of “Cathedral,” Robert shows the narrator another way to look at the world by asking him to close his eyes and change his perspective, both erasing the narrator’s previous stigma against blind people and giving the narrator a renewed sense of understanding. The narrator has full use of his eyes but doesn’t truly see the goodness in his two companions in the story, by, for example, dismissing his wife’s poetry. Though Robert is blind, he has a different type of sight, a sight that lets him emotionally connect to the narrator’s wife.
In “Cathedral” a lack of communication between the narrator and his wife
In Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” written in 1983, the author points out that empathy and perspective are the only way to truly experience profound emotion. The narrator is struggling is sucked into his own comfort zone, he drowns his dissatisfaction on life, marriage, and job in alcohol. A man of limited awareness breaks through his limitations by socializing with a blind man. Despite Roberts physical limitations, he is the one who saved narrator from himself and helped him to find the ones vies of the world.
Contrasting the narrator, Robert feels love, rather than physically “seeing” it, an emotion the narrator is incapable of. The narrator wonders “who’d want to go to such a wedding in the first place” (Carver 2) considering the wedding consisted of “just the two of them, plus the minister and the minister’s wife” (Carver 2). Instead of viewing marriage as a celebration of the love between two people, he sees marriage as a tangible ceremony focused on physicality. Because of Robert inability to see, the narrator discounts Robert and his wife’s love for each other. Their marriage was “beyond [his] understanding… they’d married, lived and worked together… and then the blind man had to bury her… without his having ever seen what [she] looked like” (Carver 2).
Sometimes in life, people will have to deal with other people that are judgmental and listen to stereo types when they know nothing about the person. In the short story “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver, there are some examples of stereotyping. This story is about a woman who has a good friend of hers and he is blind. The blind man, whose wife had just recently died and was traveling to go visit his family, was stopping at the women’s house overnight. The blind man and the narrator’s wife knew each other.
In the story, the narrator’s narrow mindset is challenged over and over again as Robert breaks most stereotypes that the narrator held. As these stereotypes are broken, the narrator begins to feel more comfortable with Robert, and sincerely tells him that he is “glad for the company”. This release from prejudice culminates in the cathedral drawing scene of the story, where the narrator finally lets go of his bias towards blind people. Once the narrator closes his eyes, he is seemingly equal to Robert, and he consequently begins to understand Robert’s perspective. His newfound empathy towards Robert demonstrates how he has lost his prejudice towards him.
What if someone unexpected changed your way of thinking, permanently? What if God chose to send someone into your life to abolish you superficial thoughts? In both the stories “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, by Flannery O’Connor, and “Cathedral”, by Raymond Carver, the authors create main characters who lack faith and think superficially about life. However, in both stories, the authors send unexpected characters to act like mediums, for their job is to be the connection of the main character’s initial position in faith and their final position, revealed at the end of both stories. Even though the stories have a different plot and involve diverse kinds of characters, the final message and moral is the same.
In "Cathedral," Raymond Carver explores the transformative power of human connection and the potential for understanding that emerges from genuine interaction. The story highlights the narrator's initial prejudice and discomfort towards the blind man, Robert, as a reflection of his narrow perception of the world. However, as the narrator and Robert engage in conversation and spend time together, a bond begins to form. This bond is exemplified in a pivotal moment when they draw a cathedral together, with the narrator's eyes closed and their hands intertwined. This shared experience allows the narrator to transcend his limited understanding and connect with Robert on a deeper level.
Psychological Distance in Raymond Carver's CATHEDRAL. " Explicator 70.3 (2012): 167-169. In this review, Peterson uncovers the irony that will become of the short story “Cathedral”.
Throughout the story the reader can affirm that the wife has a deep, strong relationship with the blind man. The wife and the blind man share an intimate and vulnerable moments together; one includes when she lets him touch her face so he can remember her. Similarly, the narrator gets to share an intimate moment with Robert that leads to an epiphany. The epiphany that the narrator experiences when drawing a cathedral refers to seeing life from Robert, the blind man’s, point of view and seeing the struggles as well as life experiences a blind man must encounter on a daily basis.
In the works of Literature an epiphany is “a moment of profound insight or revelation by which a character’s life is greatly altered” (24). In the short story “Cathedral” Raymond Carver uses epiphany to draw on the theme, blinded views can alter someone’s behavior. On the realistic level, epiphany advances the plot and character development because they are the basis for the story’s central action. They also help define the narrator and play a vital part in revealing the story’s theme. The following changes in the character’s views have shown an evident development.
The story revolves around three characters, a husband who is also referred to as Bub, his wife, and a blind man, Robert. The story begins with the wife reminiscing back at the times that she shared with Robert. She continues to talk about how much she enjoyed spending time with him. She talks about how she has kept in touch with him and how she has even written about Robert before. Even though the narrator doesn’t directly state to his wife, he happens to be “irritated” (Facknitz) by the fact his wife tends to have a connection with Robert.
The narrator brought home a friend from her past of ten years. A blind man named Robert. When Robert first came into the narrators’ life he was difficult and stubborn and wouldn’t listen to what his wife wanted. She wanted a nice evening with an old friend and her husband. They had dinner and enjoyed the evening and the company more as the night went on.
