Blog 4 Naked to the World Tina Radstone

Raymond Carver's Cathedral is a story about a man whose life is suspended in animation and is going nowhere and is jealous of his wife's relationship with a blind man that she worked for named Robert. The narrator is unnamed and is ignorant to blindness and acts as though he is unsure of himself which causes him to judge Robert when he is in fact the one who is “blind” to the world. Carver's use of blindness as a symbol gives the reader and insight and meaning to how the husband reacts to life and this blind person, Robert. A really good example of the narrator being ignorant to blind people is right in the beginning of the story when he explains, "And his being blind bothered me. My idea of blindness came from movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed. Sometimes they were led by seeing eye dogs. A blind man in the house was not something that I looked forward to." (174). This shows that he doesn't know very much about blind people and he forms his opinion of Robert based upon stereotyping from cinema. The narrator always refers to Robert as "the blind man"; he never calls him by his first name. I know that he does this because he is scared and doesn't know how to communicate with a blind person as if it requires a certain special skill. The narrator has no friends except that of his wife and lacks social skills which clearly shows the reader that this guy has a problem with people without even to getting to know them. He makes a rude comment about taking the blind man to go and play pool and all his wife wants him to do is make this man feel comfortable in his stay at their home. She makes this obvious by saying, "If you love me you can do this for me. If you don't love me okay. But if you have a friend, any friend and the friend came to visit, I'd make him feel comfortable." (176). This statement makes it obvious to  me that he has no friends at all whatsoever and is confirmed by his wife she says, "You don't have any friends...Period..." (176). Another outstanding use of symbolism is the cathedral. The narrator asks the blind man, "Do you have any idea what a cathedral is? What they look like that is?" (180). How can this blind man possibly know what a cathedral looks like; he's blind! The cathedral is used as a learning tool for the narrator to teach the blind man what a cathedral looks like through by first telling him characteristics of the cathedral, "To begin with they are very tall." (181). Seriously this was not a good way to explain what a cathedral looked like to a blind man. The cathedral was then again a learning tool for the blind man because he would hold his hand over the husband's and draw it together. Paragraph 116, page 182 explains this, "He found my hand, the hand with the pen. He closed his fist over my hand." The cathedral in the end of the story helps the blind man to visualize and conceptualize what a cathedral "looks like" but more importantly it changed the life of the narrator from being blind to Robert's disability by being able to open his heart and mind to his own life and the lives of others. A good example of this is when the narrator says "It was like nothing else in my life up to now." (183).