Cathedral
Join now to read essay Cathedral
lose Reading of Cathedral
Upon reading Raymond Carver’s short story of the Cathedral one will notice the amounts of literary devices in the short story. When analyzing the story completely, one then understands the themes, motifs, metaphors, and the overall point of the piece. This leaves the reader with an appreciation of the story and a feeling of complete satisfaction.
Carver tells the story in first person of a narrator married to his wife. Problems occur when she wants a friend of hers, an old blind man, to visit for a while because his wife has died. The narrator’s wife used to work for the blind man in Seattle when the couple was financial insecure and needed extra money. The setting here is important, because Seattle is associated with rain, and rain symbolically represents a cleansing or change. This alludes to the drastic change in the narrator in the end of the story. The wife and blind man kept in touch over the years by sending each other tape recordings of their voices which the narrator refers it to being his wife’s “chief means or recreation” (pg 581).
In he narrator does not move chronologically, contrarily, but uses small flashbacks to tell his point, leading up to the actual visit of the blind man where he then tells the story in a present tense. This lets the author seem like he is actually telling the story in person, reflecting on past occurrences of his life when necessary. His tone however, is a cynical, crude, humorous tone that carries throughout the story. The word choice and sentences are constructed with simple, lifelike words, which makes the reader sense the
Baker 2
author is really telling the story to them.
The narrator is biased against the blind from the beginning. For instance, he stereotypes all blind people thinking they “moved slowly and never laughed” (pg. 580). He only know blind men from his “idea” from Hollywood “movies” (pg.580). All through the story, he is judgmental of the blind man, which seems to stem from the time “he touched [his wife’s] face” running his fingers over her “nose, lips, and even neck!” (pg 580). Likewise, he is the protagonist in the story, and has an internal conflict with the blind man. The narrator is very possessive of his wife, despite their poor, unhealthy relationship and does not like the blind man having anything to so with her. There is evidence of their troublesome relationships through the narrators thoughts and in some of the dialogue. The wife “didn’t like that he was part of the whole military-industrial thing.” This may be because she feel she is competing with him because she also was in the “air force” (pg 581). Moreover, when discussing the blind man‘s visit, she asks her husband if he could agree to have the blind man stay, and says, “if u don’t love me ok” (pg. 581). In fact, this sarcastic remark indicates that the love they may be fake and fabricated and also demonstrates the manipulative characteristics of his wife. Moreover, she even calls her husband by the blind man’s name, “Robert” leaving the narrator hurt, yet he “shrugs“ to hide his true feelings (pg. 583). This could represent the wife’s secret feelings for the blind man, which she suppresses for her husbands sake.
The author develops these character through dialogue, but more so, the narrator’s point of view. He may be unreliable, however the reader tends to side with him, and his feelings for the invader. The narrator as a character is viewed to be cynical, rash and very
Baker 3
judgmental. He, firstly, judges the blind man’s wife name, Beulah, saying that it’s
“the name of a colored woman,” and quickly asks his wife, “is his wife a Negro?” His wife takes offense to this and states “What wrong with you.?” and asks if “[he] is drunk?” (pg 583). This once again shows the tension present within their relationship. The blind man, however, is shown to have little faults. He is described to have a “long beard” which associates him to being wise (pg. 583). The narrator and the blind man refer to each other as “bub,” giving their relationship a humorous connotation and leaving the friendship mere, and informal (pg.586).
Still, the story does follow a typical dramatic climax, but all which happens internally with the main character. This narrator first dislikes the thought of the blind man, especially the friendship between his wife an him. The rising action develops as the blind man makes himself at home and the tension between the narrator and himself grows. Most importantly, the climax and the true test of the narrator happens when the blind