In his short story Cathedral Raymond Carver challenges the conventional ideas often associated with blindness and sight. The irony in this story is that it takes a blind man to make a seeing man see.
Most stereotypes tend to make us feel superior in some way to the person or group being stereotyped. Stereotypes ignore the uniqueness of individuals by painting all members of a group with the same brush. All of us have prejudices about members of groups different from ourselves.
Cathedral is a story about a man who is meeting his wifes blind friend, Robert,
for the first time. At the beginning of the story the man does not want anything
to do with a blind man. He says, A blind man in my house was not something I looked
forward to.(Norton Anthology of American Literature; Carver, Raymond: Cathedral
page 2733) He constantly refers to his wifes friend as the blind man, making it clear that
he can not see him as a human being, he only sees him as a blind person.
"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. (p 2733) The narrators view of a blind person are how society and the media have depicted them, and so this is how most people who havent met a blind person would think of them. Ironically, though Robert is physically blind, it is the narrator who is truly blind to the world around him.
He looks at Roberts marriage and finds it hard to understand how a woman can marry a blind man and bear with the fact that hes blind. Theyd married, lived and worked together, slept together- had sex, sure- and then the blind man had to bury her. All this without his having ever seen what the goddamned woman looked like. It was beyond my understanding. Hearing this I found myself thinking what a pitiful life this woman must have led. Imagine a woman who could never see herself as she was seen in the eyes of her loved one. A woman who could go on day after day and never receive the smallest compliment from her beloved. (p. 2735) Although the narrator believes that he is describing the relationship he imagines existed between the blind man and his wife the reader knows that the description more accurately describes the relationship between the narrator and his wife. The narrator is blind to his own human relationships.
For instance, in the scene when the narrator looks out the window as Robert and his wife return from the train depot we can see that maybe his idea of the blind might not be correct. I saw my wife laughing as she parked the car. I saw her get out of the car and shut the door. She was still wearing a smile. Just amazing. (p. 2736)
I remembered having read somewhere that the blind didnt smoke because, as speculation had it, they couldnt see the smoke they exhaled. I thought I knew that much and that much only about blind people. But this blind man smoked his cigarette down to the nubbin and then lit another one. (2737) As the story progresses, you can see the husbands attitude toward the blind man starting to change.
Another example of this comes during their dinner, when the husband "watched with admiration as Robert used his knife and fork on the meat" (2737). The husband is obviously impressed that Robert can eat like any one else, and he therefore gives him
credit for accomplishing this task.
After dinner three of them are sitting on the couch smoking marijuana. When it is Roberts turn to smoke, he inhales and "held the smoke, and then let it go. It was like hed been doing it since he was nine years old" (2739). This also shows that the husband is impressed with Roberts actions, and it makes the husband start to view him as Robert the human being, instead of Robert the blind man.
The narrators wife falls asleep and Robert and the narrator are left watching and listening to the television. After a while he asks Robert if he wanted to turn in. Robert wants to stay up until the narrator is ready to turn in. We havent had a chance to talk. Know what I mean? I feel like me and her monopolized the evening. Thats all right, I said. Then I said, Im glad for the company. And I guess I was. (p. 2740) Here the narrator has turned the corner on his view of Robert.
After flipping through the television channels and finding nothing on but a program about cathedrals the narrator apologizes to Robert who replies Whatever you want to watch is okay. Im always learning something. Learning never ends. (p. 2740)
After a few minutes of trying to describe a cathedral to the blind man the narrator
says, But I cant tell you what a cathedral looks like. It just isnt in me to do it. I cant do it anymore than Ive done.(p. 2742)
Robert asks him to find some heavy paper and a pen and suggests that they draw a cathedral together. After gathering the stuff he asked for and clearing off the coffee table Robert sat next to the narrator on the floor. He found my hand, the hand with the pen, He closed his hand over my hand. Go ahead, bub, draw, he said. Draw. Youll see. Draw.(p. 2742)
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