The narrator in the short story Cathedral does not seem to have much connection with anything or anyone. His wife has asked an old friend to come for a visit. The friend is a blind man she had worked for as his reader. The blind man, Robert, had just lost his wife, Beulah. The narrator’s wife had been a friend of Beulah’s too. The narrator is not in a very good mood about the whole idea. He gives the excuse that he has never been around a blind man before and he does not want to be around one now. But maybe he was really jealous because his wife had told him about how Robert had touched his wife’s face one day in order to imagine what she might look like.
Robert’s touching his wife’s face such a long time ago, before the narrator even knew her, seemed very upsetting to the narrator. This is a clue that he does not have a good connection with his wife or with his feelings. He is very negative about everything that comes up. This makes him sound like he might not be very self-confident.
The blind man cannot see a thing but he is a kind person. He listens when people talk to him. He has been a very good friend to the wife in the story. Robert was the one she talked to a lot after she had tried to commit suicide. They had been sharing stories from their lives using tape recordings for about ten years. The narrator does not understand the significance of their close friendship. Even though Robert is blind he sees and understands the narrator’s wife much better than the narrator does.
After Robert arrives the story is divided up by having drinks, then a big meal and then after diner more drinks. A reader can understand how much time has passed this way. Late in the evening, close to bedtime the narrator and Robert smoke some cannabis. The narrator sits on the couch next to Robert to do this so he has started becoming closer, at least physically to Robert.
Then the narrator seems to have become more relaxed from the food, the drinks and the marijuana because something that does not seem characteristic of his personality happens. He wants to be able to describe what a cathedral looks like to the blind man. Wanting to be able to communicate was not something that he had done before in the story. From the story’s dialogue he did not seem to be the type of person that would want to do that.
Even though he tried he could not explain what a cathedral looked like to Robert. But Robert had an idea to solve the problem. The narrator drew a cathedral with a ball point pen on a shopping bag. The blind man put his hand on the narrator’s as the drawing was being made. In that way the blind man was better able to understand what a cathedral was like. At one point while they are drawing, Robert tells the narrator to close his eyes. The narrator closes his eyes so now he is essentially blind, too and he is drawing blind. When Robert told him to open his eyes and take a look at the drawing, a strange thing happened. The narrator did not want to open his eyes. Something inside him had changed. He had been able to connect with the blind man. The narrator could appreciate now what was seeing and what was not seeing.
Carver, R. (1989). Cathedral. New York, NY: Vintage. Print.
Baxter, S. (2009).The writer within: A psychoanalytic exploration of Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral.” Yahoo! Voices. Retrieved from http://voices.yahoo.com/the-writer-within-psychoanalytic-exploration-of-3216998.html?cat=44
