Blindness Is Considered A Disability In Raymond Carver's Cathedral

Mike Wilcox
Eng. 113 12-1250
Mr. Canipe
28 November 2007

Blindness is considered a disability. The person with a disability in Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” is Bub. A person can be handicapped mentally. Bub is self-centered, and lives inside his own world. He is “blind” to the world around him and does not wish to open his mind to anything outside of his ignorant, pathetic, mundane life. Robert opens Bub’s mind, enabling Bub to see Robert as a person first, and not a blind man.
Robert is an old friend of Bub’s wife. Bub is jealous of his wife and Robert’s relationship, as well as her first husband. She worked for Robert during a summer. She read case studies and reports to him, and helped him organize his office. Robert’s wife Beulah
He saw that Bub was frustrated with not being able to describe what he was seeing on TV. Robert had Bub get heavy paper and a pen. Robert told Bub they would draw a cathedral. The entire time Bub was drawing, Robert reassured and encouraged him, telling him how good he was doing. Robert put his hand on Bubs as he drew. After Bub was a bit surer of himself, Robert told him to close his eyes and continue to draw. Robert knew when the cathedral was complete. He told Bub to open his eyes and asked how it looked. Bub kept his eyes closed and said “it’s really something.” (108) This experience with Robert freed his mind and opened his eyes to a new world; A world of imagination and creativity. In Bubs mind, he said “it was like nothing else in my life up to now.” He continues “my eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.” (108) Facknitz again sums it up best:
In the moment when the blind man and [Bub] share an identical perception of spiritual space, [Bub’s] sense of enclosure – of being confined by his own house and circumstances – vanishes as if by an act of grace, or a very large spiritual reward for a virtually insignificant gesture. [Bub] learns to see with eyes other than that insufficient set that keeps him a friendless drunk and a meager husband.
He says that he “smoked dope and stayed up as long as I could. My wife and I hardly went to bed at the same time. (105) When conversation with Robert became awkward, instead of dealing with them, he asks Robert if he would like to smoke some dope. Along with dope, Bub refers to drinking numerous times throughout the story, calling it “one of our pastimes” (102) While Bub is blind to his own ignorance, he could also be considered blind to his wife and her feelings and needs. In contrast, Robert held a close relationship with Bub’s wife, allowing himself to be an outlet for her to speak about her feelings on the tapes she sent him. Bub is insensitive to her feelings. We see this when he brushed off the poems she had written to Robert. The blindness that separates Bub from Robert in the beginning of the story brings them together in the end.
The life Raymond Carver lived comes out in his writings. He struggled with alcoholism until 1977. A biography written about Carver tells of the struggle he