Loneliness In Raymond Carver's Cathedral

Accepting people for who they are without ever meeting them, is something that many find difficult at times to do. Usually after experiencing something significant with that person though, individuals are finally able to learn and grow from the shared experience. During the events of Raymond Carver’s ‘Cathedral’, the narrator goes from a lonely man, who is constantly insulting and belittling Robert, the blind man in the story, to learning how to get along with someone who is totally different from him. By using the interaction of the characters and drawing from his own life experiences, Carver is able to produce a story that shows how tolerance and understanding can be learned if people are willing to learn. Individuals that experience loneliness

In Carver’s life, this loneliness could have come from him moving and never settling in one place for a long time or from the failure of his first marriage (Caldwell). The narrator in ‘Cathedral’ somewhat embodies the loneliness that Carver may have experienced throughout his years because according to the narrator’s wife in the story, “[he doesn’t] have any friends.” (Carver 36) This statement clearly shows, that the narrator has only one person in his life, which is his wife, who he immediately shows jealously about when he remembers the story she told him about Robert touching her face for he could get a picture of what she looked like in his mind. This reaction from the narrator could have mirrored what Carver himself was thinking when his second wife had invited a blind man to their house. (Caldwell) Even

A passage or so goes by with them drinking and having small talk and when the narrator changes the channel to a program showing a cathedral they begin a deeper conversation that ends up breaking the narrator’s wall down. Finding out that the blind man does not know what a cathedral looks like, the narrator tries to describe it to him but fails.(Carver 45) At this point, the narrator realizes that if he wants to show Robert what a cathedral looks like, then he has to be like Robert and use his sense of feel instead of sight. Afterwards, Robert tells the narrator to grab some paper and a pen and that by feeling what the narrator is drawing, he himself can see it in his mind’s eye. And that is what they do, in the end they draw a cathedral and the narrator says to himself, “it’s really something” (Carver 46).By drawing the cathedral with Robert and closing his eyes, he can now truly see beyond the superficial thoughts he had against the man and realizes that he is no longer trapped behind the wall he built up. Also by drawing a cathedral, which can symbolize a place to come together at, he is now not alone and is in a way connected to Robert. This entire scene in the book, is said to be identical to what happened to Carver himself and Jerry Carriveau the blind man who actually came to visit the family (Caldwell). By drawing with the