Raymond Carver Cathedral Essay

Isolation of the human heart results in the inability to connect and take part in a greater existence, whereas blindness of the human eye gives way to the truth and tenderness of humanity found in the wonders of this world. In Raymond Carver’s short story, “Cathedral”, the nameless narrator seems to exhibit behavioral patterns of an addict, tending to detach himself from the plot and all relationships that he continuously fails to confront throughout life. The central figure, who abhors the blind, is ignorant to his own constraints, which prevent him from recognizing the traces of transcendency in humanity that lies beyond the temptation of physical pleasure. Through the utilization of the communion model, by way of first-person narration,

When it comes to the sexual facet of his wife, he is protective of her even when sitting with a man with is incapable of valuing her physical appeal. For instance, when his wife fell asleep on the sofa, “she’d turn so that the robe had slipped away from her legs, exposing a juicy thigh. He reached to draw her robe back over her, and it was then he glanced at the blind man… he flipped the robe open again.” One may note that through these actions, the possessive side of that narrator is revealed only when his wife is physically vulnerable, though when it comes to her sincere intuition expressed through her passion of poetry, the blind man values her feelings that are exposed through the meaning of the text unlike her husband, who “doesn’t think much of the poem” or any poem because he does not recognize the worth of any mental object, such as thought, only the benefitiful physical ones. Through the use of an extended metaphor, Carver explains that “he just doesn’t understand poetry” much like he doesn’t understand the blind man, who does not gather wisdom by visually perceiving the world around him. The main character’s reliance on an ocular reality is further exemplified when he attempts to “imagine a woman who could never see herself as she was seen in the eyes of her

From the tapes to the cathedral, each element of this plot has an intended purpose in the mind of this profound author. Scaling from one end of the spectrum to another, whether the object is five inches tall or hundreds of feet tall, the tapes and the cathedral represent the husband’s insecurities of which he has spent his entire life avoiding to confront. To be more specific, after sharing a meal and his wife dozing off, the husband was asked “if he was religious in any way”, and he blatantly answered the blind man’s question with this response: “I guess I don’t believe in it. In anything.” This statement alone affirms the reader’s inference of relational disunion between the main character and the other static characters; he has nothing more significant to want in life because he simply does not see anything greater that life has to offer with his one dimensional mindset. Though being destined by Carver to pursue the role a dynamic character in the plot, the husband begins to embrace these acts of communion between him and Robert. He is now “glad for the company” of Robert, a significant figure who speaks the underlying mind of Carver. Word by word, the husband begins to adopt Robert’s wisdom. For example, Robert briefly mentioned, “the men who began their life’s work on them, they never lived to see the completion of their