Alice Munro Cathedral Analysis

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Many people have issues with their past and their past will come back without them knowing. This issue is what happens in the stories “The Jack Randa Hotel” and “Cathedral”. A character from both stories get jealous of their significant other being around someone that is from their past. Gail in “The Jack Randa Hotel,” writes letters to her ex husband acting like someone else then eventually, he finds out it was her. The narrator in “Cathedral” ends up becoming friends with the blind man and feels what he has to deal with every day of his life. One issue that occurs in the story “The Jack Randa Hotel” by Alice Munro is that Gail gets extremely jealous of her ex husband, Will, and his new wife, Sandy. She remembers her life with Will being …show more content…

The narrator’s wife knew Robert for a long time because she used to work for him and his wife had died so she was the one who was taking care of him since he was all alone. “I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit” (Carver 2) said the narrator. The narrator did not like the blind man because he was extremely close with his wife and they were always sending each other tapes in the mail to keep in touch. Since the narrator was not such a big fan of the blind man, he did not understand why it was such a important time when Robert had asked to touch his wife’s face during her last day working with him. She was working with him all summer but he was blind so he did not even know what she looked like so when he touched her face, she wanted to write a poem about it since it was an important time during her summer job helping him. A while after the narrators wife worked with Robert, they ended up communicating again and she sent him a recording of her talking about her recent life. “She loved her husband but she didn’t like it where they lived and she didn’t like it that he was a part of the military-industrial thing” (Carver 2). The narrator was getting jealous of this relationship between the two of them because it seemed to be going better then his and his wife’s relationship. Since the blind man moved into their house for a period of time, …show more content…

She ends up walking past Will and Sandy’s new house and she spots a mailbox then decides to put her hand in it and see if there is anything that she can get that would relate to Will and his new life. A letter comes out and she puts it in her purse. She looks at it then says “It is Will’s own writing on the envelope. Not a letter to Will, then, but a letter from him. A letter he has sent to Ms Catherine Thornaby, 491 Hawtre Street” (Munro 6). Catherine had died so the letter was sent back to Will. Gail then reads the letter and decides that it is fine to write back to him as Ms. Thornaby. The letter Will had sent her the day she died, had said “You do not know me, but I hope that once I have explained myself, we may meet and talk. I believe that I may be a Canadian cousin of yours” (Munro 6). Gail was replying in very rude ways. One reply she gave him was “Did you really expect me, just because I have the same surname as you, to fling open my door and put out the ‘welcome mat’ as I think you say in America and that inevitably includes Canada? You may be looking for another mother here, but that hardly obliges me to be one” (Munro 8). In the next letter that Will send, Gail found out that his mother had died and he went back to Canada for her

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