Cathedral: Allegory of the Cave and Narrator
1/23/14
Comparative Literary Analysis
Performance Task Allegory of the Cathedral As the philospoher Seneca once said, “It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable.” Raymond Carver’s Cathedral is a story about a man who started out as a closed-minded man but, throughout the story his character changes as he begins to bond with his wife’s friend, Robert, a man who is blind. Plato’s Allegory of the cave is a story about a prisoner who is freed from being locked in chains living all of his life underground and finding out a different perspective about a lie he’s been living his whole life, being told as a conversation between Socrates and Glaucon. In the stories, “ Cathedral” by Raymond Carver, and “ Allegory of the Cave” by Plato, both authors argue that a person’s reality is not always what is seems to be. In “ Cathedral,” Raymond Carver uses irony between the narrator and Robert when they talk about the cathedral. The narrator tries to explain how a cathedral looks like with words when he says “ To begin with, they’re very tall. I was looking around the room for clues. They reach way up. Up and up. Toward the sky. They’re so big, some of them, they have to have these supports. To help hold them up, so to speak” to Robert who is blind and can’t really apprehend what is being said. (Carver, page 24, lines 448-451). Until Robert asks to be drawn a cathedral when he says “ Hey, listen to me. Will you do me a favor? I got an idea. Why don’t you find us a pen and some heavy paper. Go on, bub, get the stuff” the narrator realizes that Robert sees by touching around the paper. (Carver, page 25, lines 492-495). What the narrator doesn’t understand is that the blind man can’t see what he sees even though he thinks that by describing with words about how a cathedral looks, helps. The irony Carver is trying to show is that the narrator is the one who is blind, not Robert, because he perceives his reality to be similar to Roberts but instead really isn’t. In “
Comparative Literary Analysis
Performance Task Allegory of the Cathedral As the philospoher Seneca once said, “It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable.” Raymond Carver’s Cathedral is a story about a man who started out as a closed-minded man but, throughout the story his character changes as he begins to bond with his wife’s friend, Robert, a man who is blind. Plato’s Allegory of the cave is a story about a prisoner who is freed from being locked in chains living all of his life underground and finding out a different perspective about a lie he’s been living his whole life, being told as a conversation between Socrates and Glaucon. In the stories, “ Cathedral” by Raymond Carver, and “ Allegory of the Cave” by Plato, both authors argue that a person’s reality is not always what is seems to be. In “ Cathedral,” Raymond Carver uses irony between the narrator and Robert when they talk about the cathedral. The narrator tries to explain how a cathedral looks like with words when he says “ To begin with, they’re very tall. I was looking around the room for clues. They reach way up. Up and up. Toward the sky. They’re so big, some of them, they have to have these supports. To help hold them up, so to speak” to Robert who is blind and can’t really apprehend what is being said. (Carver, page 24, lines 448-451). Until Robert asks to be drawn a cathedral when he says “ Hey, listen to me. Will you do me a favor? I got an idea. Why don’t you find us a pen and some heavy paper. Go on, bub, get the stuff” the narrator realizes that Robert sees by touching around the paper. (Carver, page 25, lines 492-495). What the narrator doesn’t understand is that the blind man can’t see what he sees even though he thinks that by describing with words about how a cathedral looks, helps. The irony Carver is trying to show is that the narrator is the one who is blind, not Robert, because he perceives his reality to be similar to Roberts but instead really isn’t. In “