Sign Up Now
Get instant access to over 1 million+ study documents
OR
Already registered? click here to login
By creating your account, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and student honor code.
As Bub found out, he cannot verbally convey the concept of cathedral to the blind man. He has to show him; he had no actually get down on his knees and speak the blind man's language. The narrator admits that he had to level with Robert: "my life depended on it."
Prior to his epiphany, Bub remained stubbornly prejudiced, believing such silly notions as "The blind didn't smoke because...they couldn't see the smoke they exhaled." The narrator's narrow world prevented him from viewing Robert as a person. Instead, all he saw was a stereotypical blind man. For example, Bub expected Robert to be wearing sunglasses and when he wasn't he was shocked. Similarly, the narrator seems to think that the blind man's beard is somehow out of place simply because Robert cannot see. The narrator's prejudices remain solidly in place until the conversation about the cathedral.
Bub is not a bad man; he represents the tendency within all human beings to see others not...
Therefore, Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" is about the universal phenomenon of stereotyping and how stereotypes prevent the flowering of human love and genuine understanding. Viewing Robert not as an individual but as a nebulous "blind man," the narrator and his new friend cannot find common ground. They gobble down their dinner in silence, as they have nothing to say to one another and Bub hides behind the television so that he doesn't have to address Robert directly. Bub's prejudices extend beyond those about the visually impaired, as he reacts with shock upon hearing that Robert's wife was named Beulah. "Beulah!" he exclaims. "That's a name for a colored woman." The narrator may not be able to color his skin, but he was able to shut his eyes and feel what it was like, if only for a moment, to be blind.
Works Cited
Carver, Raymond. "Cathedral." The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym.
Works Cited
Carver, Raymond. "Cathedral." The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym.
The fact that smoke obscures vision even for the sighted is of course important; the cigarettes being smoked not only make Robert more like the unnamed narrator, but they also make the narrator more like the bind Robert by reducing this narrator's vision, though not in an extreme way. The smoke that uncurls between these two characters later in the story is even more effective at bringing them together. The
Cathedral Character Analysis: Cathedral Narrator The objective of this study is to present an argument that the narrator in 'Cathedral' is a complex and sympathetic character and to consider the extent to which he seems unaware with his own limitations despite being incapable of articulating that unhappiness. The narrator in the work of Raymond Carver entitled "Cathedral" is a complex and sympathetic character who is unaware of his own limitations and essentially
The beginning of the end being her attempted suicide, due to the fact that she felt disconnected from him, her first husband, and the world, as he was in the military and they had constantly moved away from human connections she had made. (Carver NP) Her second marriage, to the insular narrator, going to bed at different times, and he sitting up watching late night television in his insular
Carver's "Cathedral" An Analysis of Theme and Plot in Carver's "Cathedral" Raymond Carver states that by the mid-1960s he had tired of reading and writing "long narrative fiction" ("On Writing" 46). Shorter fiction, he found, was more immediate. Flannery O'Connor states a similar idea in The Habit of Being: for her, the novel was a literary medium that could bog down all of one's creative powers. Turning to a short story was
Raymond Carver, "Cathedral" Raymond Carver's short story "Cathedral" is narrated in the first person by the unnamed protagonist, and tells a deceptively simple story: the narrator's wife (also unnamed) has invited her former employer Robert, an older blind man recently widowed, to come for dinner and stay the night. The husband is resistant to the social occasion, but goes through with it -- although his narration makes us privy to his
Carver, "Cathedral" Despite its prominent placement in the title of the story, the cathedral in Raymond Carver's short story "Cathedral" takes quite a while to make its appearance. The story instead is about a marriage -- a husband and wife have a guest to dinner. Carver's story is narrated in the first person, from the perspective of the husband, so to some extent the symbolism of the story is constructed with