American literature: history, themes, and major works

¶ … Ginsberg describes in Howl is a chaotic and hopeless world filled with drugs, alcohol, and sex. It is also a pointless world, which is what Ginsberg is trying to say with this chaotic and disjointed poem. In Part I of the poem, he refers to young people of the "beat" generation, and infers that their lives were pretty meaningless even though they thought they were filled with meaning and importance. These are the people "who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty / incantations which in the yellow morning were / stanzas of gibberish" (Ginsberg). He shows that even though he was one of them, he could look at them with clear eyes, seeing the meaningless in their lives and work. In Part II of the poem, he describes the greed and corruption of capitalism, "demonic industries" (Ginsberg) and everything that goes with them, from pollution to the suburbs. Throughout the poem, he uses unusual patterns and language to create an experiment in a new form of poetry. It uses hyperbole to make the situations even more exaggerated and outlandish, and to make the poem more memorable. He also shows how multicultural America is, by combining different nationalities and cultures throughout the poem.

In "Cathedral," the narrator doesn't seem connected with anything. He isn't connected with his wife, a sensitive woman who writes poetry, and he doesn't understand her affection for the blind man. In reality, the blind man really "sees" more than the narrator does, because he is able to connect with people and share his feelings. The narrator is really the "blind" man in this story, because he is blind to everything around him and disconnected with his life and the people who care about him. The liquor and marijuana are used to put barriers between the narrator and others. He can't connect with people when he's straight, so he has to get stoned or drunk to really communicate or think about anything at all. In addition, they make the narrator more aware of his own feelings, even though they act as a barrier, and ultimately, they allow him to see something that he never saw before in his life. In the end, Carver is trying to say that the narrator suddenly feels free, unbound by the confines of his home or his thoughts. His time with the blind man has changed him, and made him feel connected to something for the first time in his life, and it is inspiring to him.