A Blind Man´s View In Raymond Carver's Story Cathedral

Thomas Savoie
Prof. Hatley
January 11, 2015
Words 875
A Blind Man’s View In Raymond Carver’s story, Cathedral, the narrator is never named but he is descripted by how he describes the blind man. He is described as very vulgar, not being able to hold his tongue. He tells you that he has never seen a blind man let alone tried to have a conversation with one. He is very ignorant to the fact of all the things blind people can still do and the extra pleasures of life that they have. In this story the narrator learns how to see through the eyes of a blind man. There are several points in the story where the blind man teaches him something new about the perspective a blind man has of the world. In order to explain what the blind man teaches to the
He thinks to himself, “They’d 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 goddamn woman looked like. It was beyond my Understanding.” (Carver 35). In this quote the narrator doesn’t understand that even though Robert had never “seen” his wife that he was able to get an idea of what she looked like by feeling her features. The blind man also is also able to look past someone’s appearance and get a first impression by the way someone talks to him rather than their skin color or the way they dress. In a way the narrator is blinded from who people really are because he is a sighted person. Another example of his incompetence is when Robert starts to smoke and the narrator thinks, “I remembered having read somewhere that the blind didn’t smoke because as speculation had it, they couldn’t see the smoke they exhaled. I thought I knew that much and that much only about blind people.” (Carver 36). This is a prime example of how the narrator is ignorant because people do not smoke so they can see themselves exhaling smoke. This is where Robert starts to teach the narrator about blind people and their
I watched with admiration as he used his knife on the meet.” (Carver 37). It also states how he methodically eats everything on his plate and how he uses his hands sometimes. This is important that the narrator sees this because it gives him and the reader an insight to the fact that blind people use other senses to experience simple tasks such as feeling the food that they eat instead of seeing it. After dinner the three of them go to the living room to chat, as conversation dies down the narrator turns on the TV, “‘This is a color TV,’ the blind man says. ‘Don’t ask how, but I can tell.’” (Carver 37). When Robert says this he is giving the narrator and the reader another example of how blind people use their other senses to experience different situations in life. The fact that the blind man can differentiate between a black and white TV from a colored TV is bewildering. It doesn’t say in the story how Robert does this but the reader can infer it is his hearing that allows him to distinguish between the two. While they are watching TV the narrator changes the channel to a station that is showing a selection of gorgeous cathedrals. A man on the TV is talking about the history of them as they show videos of them all. The narrator tries to verbally describe the cathedrals