The same principle stands for the narrator. We can’t get a full understanding of what Robert and the narrator’s wife is truly like because we only have the narrator’s word to go on.Īs such, we have a completely biased and distorted view of practically every character. The narrator is living this life and it’s essentially a personal account of his experience of meeting and interacting with his wife’s friend. The language isn’t complex and even a child could read and grasp the basic premise of the story with little effort.Ĭarver writes Cathedral in such a way as to bring us into the narrator’s mind. Another area where we can see this is through his simple sentences. Carver is an author known for his minimalist stories. What makes this part of the story so memorable is its simplicity. Something changes inside him and the experience purges his resentfulness. He experiences what it’s like to be like Robert, to be blind for the first time. He told the narrator to close his eyes as he drew. Robert placed his hand on the narrator’s as he drew.
The narrator had no words to describe it, so he did. Towards the end of the story, Robert asks the narrator to draw him the cathedral. By leaving the reader guessing as to the narrator’s motives, he makes this message as potent as possible. It’s a representation of how so many prejudices are based on nothing. Whether he’s jealous or paranoid is unclear, but his dislike of the man is made clear from the beginning.
The majority of the story involves the unnamed narrator attempting to deal with his underlying hostility towards the blind man. Throughout the visit of Robert, the blind man, the narrator learns more about himself and passes on a message of tolerance and understanding to the reader.Ĭarver’s work was later published in Best American Short Stories, 1982. The story centers on an unnamed narrator, who has a strong sense of dislike towards a blind friend of his wife’s. Raymond Carver penned the 1983 short story Cathedral in an anthology of the same name. Blindness and disability is a strong theme in literature.
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