Raymond Carver

             Raymond Carver's Cathedral tells the story of a man transitioning from a self-centered, jealous husband, to one who overcomes his own prejudice. Cathedral, is about two blind men. Robert is physically blind, and the narrator is blind psychologically. Robert enters the narrator's life and in doing so Robert is giving the narrator his first glimpse into the "real world". The narrator gains insight from Robert into a new world, the narrator now sees past what people physically are, he experiences this from Robert's sight.
             Carver illustrates just how blind the narrator is within the first paragraph of the story. "My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed" (Carver, 122). The narrator has already made an assumption regarding Robert and is not open to the possibility that Robert can be something other than the images the movies have given the narrator. The narrator is not only ignorant about people who are blind, but about other topics as well. When his wife mentions that Robert's wife's' name was Beulah, he states that Beulah is a name for a colored woman.
             The narrator's wife is a sensitive woman who is in touch with her feelings. This is illustrated when the narrator discusses his wife's poems. He describes a time when his wife once wrote a poem about the time Robert touched her face. "She even tried to write a poem about it. She was always trying to write a poem. She wrote a poem or two every year usually after something really important had happened to her" (Carver, 122). The narrator is not at all like his wife; he does not understand her poems and is not in touch with his own emotions; instead, he sees everything at face value. Carver illustrates this when the narrator imagines what marriage between Robert and Beulah must have been like.
             They'd married, lived and worked together...

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Raymond Carver. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 01:12, July 02, 2025, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/28048.html