The Cause Of Conflict In Raymond Carver's Cathedral

The author use of the title “Cathedral” was misleading at first. “Cathedral” is about a husband who had an interesting experience with his wife’s blind friend. The narrator, also known as the husband, had difficulty understanding other people thoughts and personal feelings. The narrator knew how important the blind man is to his wife, yet he still makes careless jokes about him. “Maybe I could take him bowling” was a comment made by the narrator after finding out that the blind man was staying over his house. 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

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.

The essay “Cathedral”, by Robert Carver, is about a man who is unsure of a blind gentleman named Robert that is coming to stay in his home for the weekend. His wife met Robert when she was reading to the blind. The narrator of the story who remains unnamed through the essay is not happy about Robert coming to stay in his home. He thought all blind people were the same and Robert taught him what it was like to be blind.

Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” is narrated by a man who is unhappy that his wife is friends with a blind man. He has not ever known any blind people in his life and he has many ill conceived conceptions about them and how they perceive the world. The narrator unfolds the story slowly to show his own lack of perception with regard to his wife and the world around him. He comes to realize that perhaps the man that cannot see with his eyes can “see” reality better than he can.

In the Raymond Carver stories “Cathedral” and “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” communication plays a major role in developing the story. In this essay I will analyze how the theme of communication plays both similar and different roles in developing the meaning of these two stories to further understand how communication effects the characters. Communication is an important part of the story to understand because it gives the reader a better understanding of the moral of the story as well as important life influences of the author. “Cathedral” and “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” are excellent to stories to compare their theme of communication because communication gives each story a unique meaning, but both stories use communication in different ways to do so. By exploring the different types of communication in these two stories it will be easier to understand the moral meaning of the stories but also how different types of communication can be more effective than verbal communication.

“You can't judge an album by a single song; it's like judging a book by only reading a single chapter” Trevor Rabin. Although the short stories Cathedral and A Rose for Emily have completely different plots, they both have morals that are described in this quote. Cathedral follows around a blind man named Robert visiting an old friend and her husband, who does not care for the Robert. A Rose for Emily is about Emily, a woman who is perceived as a local oddity but soon the townspeople realize she is not just odd, but also a little bit crazy. Both Emily from the short story, A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner, and Robert from Cathedral by Raymond Carver, portray characters that become of the targets of premature assumptions, but when the

The narrator of Raymond Carver's short story Cathedral starts by saying, "This blind man, an old friend of my wife's, he was on his way to spend the night. "The narrator continues to say that after the blind man's wife died while visiting her relatives in nearby Connecticut, he had called the narrator's wife to arrange a visit of old friends. The narrator admits he is not excited about this man coming to visit his wife. "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." Soon enough, the narrator would come to look at being blind in a much different way and even come to realize that he himself is being blind.

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.

“His being blind bothered me” (Carver 1). In Raymond Carver’s short story Cathedral, Carver establishes an ignorant narrator, who is dependent on alcohol and fixated upon physical appearance; he juxtaposes the narrator to a blind man who sees with his heart rather than his eyes. Through indirect characterization, Carver contrasts the narcissistic narrator to the intuitive blind man while utilizing sight as a symbol of emotional understanding. He establishes the difference between looking and seeing to prove that sight is more than physical.

Carver highlights the narrator’s prejudice in the opening section of the story in order to reveal how the narrator’s bias against blind people in general leads to a preconceived negative opinion on Robert. From the outset, the narrator acknowledges his prejudice by mentioning that his “idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed” (Carver, 1). The narrator’s negative prejudice is not caused by knowing a blind man; rather, it is derived from an external factor, demonstrating how the narrator has formulated an opinion on people he has never met. Consequently, the narrator assumes that Robert will conform to the negative stereotype present in his mind, and is unpleased about Robert’s visit. Carver

Raymond Carver is said to be one the most influential American writers and poets in the 20th century, especially in his works of short stories. One of his most famous pieces is “Cathedral.” This well-known short story is the final piece in Carver’s collection Cathedral published in 1983. Carver includes much symbolism through the story’s plot, structure, point of view, tone, and character build. The depictions of each character’s experiences, the irony in the story, and hearing the narrator’s point of view in “Cathedral” work in harmony to support its themes that prejudice and ignorance as well as the nature of reality are present and change throughout the course of the story, and all lead to a strong character development by the close.

In “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver, the narrator struggles with an internal conflict that involves him never being able to be in a vulnerable or sensitive state, especially when he is with his wife. The narrator creates suspense by having the reader wait until the end to realize what the blind man was referring to when he states, “From all you’ve said about him, I can only conclude—” (Carver 35). The reader can observe that the blind man was explaining that the husband was missing out on all aspects of life and the little things the world has to offer. The husband was so closed-minded, that he was missing out on having a deeper connection with his wife. 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. However, the focal point within the story occurs when the narrator gets to have a vulnerable moment with the blind man that he has never encountered before, and it makes him feel liberated.

“Cathedral” is a short and warm story written by Raymond Carver. The author portrays the story in the first person narrative. Carver presents the interaction between an unnamed couple and a blind man by the name of Robert, who is visiting them. The story is told by the husband, the narrator, who is a prejudiced, jealous, and insecure man with very limited awareness of blindness. This theme is exposed through Carver’s description of the actions of the narrator whose lack of knowledge by stereotyping a blind man. However, the story takes an unpredicted and meaningful turn at the end when the narrator see things from a blind man’s standpoint.

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.

Communication is one of the most important aspects of human life. Without communication, we would be a primitive society of wild animals, unable to cooperate and achieve great feats, such as building the Pyramids, landing on the Moon, or organizing a democracy. All people rely on communication to express ideas that motivate positive societal and political change. Yet not everybody communicates in the same way. There are several thousand languages that people speak; there are several hundred thousand people around the world that suffer from disabilities such and blindness or deafness that require special means of communications such as braille or sign language. Naturally, those who communicate differently or are different from other people in general are prone to stereotypes and widespread discrimination. Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” is a critique of and a unique story regarding the untruth of many of those stereotypes surrounding the visually impaired. Acceptance of people different from ourselves because of spoken language or disability is pertinent to understanding their lives and the world we live in, and through my personal experiences, I now understand that to the fullest extent. The theme of tolerance within the context of language and communication barriers rings loudly in Robert and the narrator’s encounter in “Cathedral”, my personal relationship to my late aunt, and my experience being the son of an immigrant, all of them teaching that those that are blind, or