Raymond Carver Cathedral Analysis

Aicha Bah 1555558 Bah 1
Beverly Fraser
Effective Reading and Writing 603-101-MC
Friday October 30th, 2015
Cathedral
In the short story “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver, the author represents that physical appearance and personality are two different things through the characters actions. The unnamed narrator and his wife don’t know each other intimately although they live together. Consequently, after working for a blind man named Robert, the wife of the insensitive man built a friendship with him that is clearly stronger than her marriage. After ten years of keeping in touch with the blind man by sending each other audiotapes, she invites
He is insensitive, ignorant and prejudice. Unlike the blind man he ignores people’s thoughts, feelings and psychological qualities and only looks at their physical appearance to build their personality in his head. Since Robert is blind, he thought that he would be a depressive person who is constantly led by a dog like he saw in certain movies. The fact that he stereotypes his wife’s dear friend is an example of his ignorance. “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. A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to” (Carver, 1981). To add, if we view his comment from a different perspective we can say that the husband is jealous. Maybe he is just saying mean things about blind people to make Robert seem like a bad person, since he is a good friend of his wife, which obviously makes him feel uneasy and troubled. Therefore, the narrator’s way of thinking makes us conclude that he is insensitive, ignorant, prejudice and
Although we may think that she is kind and genuine, we can understand that it is not the case if we analyse the story long enough. The unnamed woman does not see that her husband is jealous and forgets that the visit might be awkward for him. Anyhow, due to the lack of her presence in the story, her past is the only thing that can give us a major description of the wife. Carver explains that the fact that she is so unhappy is because of her past relationships through the audiotapes she sends to Robert. Her last partner was part of the military forces, which made them move a lot. “My wife’s officer was posted to one base and then another. She sent tapes from Moody AFB, McGuire, McConnell, and finally Travis, near Sacramento, where one night she got to feeling lonely and cut off from people she kept losing in that moving-around life. She got to feeling she couldn’t go it another step. She went in and swallowed all the pills and capsules in the medicine chest and washed them down with a bottle of gin. Then she got into a hot bath and passed out. But instead of dying, she got sick. She threw up” (Carver, 1981). She felt so lonely and eventually fell into depression, which led her to a suicide attempt. Her attachment to Robert comes from the fact that they still kept in touch even though they were so far from each other, unlike all the other people she had to lose from moving so