"Cathedral" by Raymond Carver - Question 1 Reading Response

Insoo Cho
Prof. Raquel Corona
English 102

Question 1.  What is the significance of the "cathedral?"  Why do you think the author chose this particular structure for the characters to draw in the story?  Would the story be different if it were a different object that they were drawing?  Why or why not?

The significance of the cathedral in the story is a portal which links two different worlds, those of the narrator and the blind man beyond the blind man’s disability, and the narrator’s prejudices.

The narrator's demeanor from the beginning of the story indicates that he is completely blinded by prejudice. He repeatedly makes prejudice assumptions about the blind man throughout the story and made it clear that he wasn’t fond of a blind man sleeping over at his house. Even when his assumptions were challenged by Robert, the blind man, it only intensified his hostility towards him. The signs of discomfort of the narrator were exposed by his comments such as “I’d always thought dark glasses were a must for the blind. Fact was, I wish he had a pair… Creepy” and “Robert had done a little of everything, it seemed, a regular blind jack-of-all-trades”.

Robert’s disability was not the only thing that triggered his irritation, but Robert’s mere presence, the presence of a man who knows everything about his wife through exchanges of tape after tape through a decade of friendship and the incident - of him touching her face, which was so important that she wrote a poem about it - made him feel insecure and jealous. However, his wife made no effort to comfort him but, even worse, made him feel left out. “My wife finally took her eye off the blind man and looked at me. I had the feeling she didn’t like what she saw. I shrugged”.

But things started to change upon his wife’s absence; putting his feelings aside, the narrator attempts to open up to the blind man. Although aware that Robert is blind, he still makes an attempt to show his hospitality. Then something suddenly occurs to him while they are watching a TV show about cathedrals, something that allows him to break out from the shell of chariness - breaking the unspoken rule of not talking about the things that the blind cannot see - and asks Robert about cathedrals, questioning his intakes of things that he cannot see.

When Robert asks the narrator to describe a cathedral, the narrator fails to do so, thinking it may be because he doesn’t believe in it and it has no special meaning to him. But when Robert helps the narrator draw a cathedral with his hand over the narrator’s hand, the narrator realizes then that the reason why he couldn’t describe the cathedral was because he just didn’t know how to really “see” things, no better than what Robert can “see”. Robert used the cathedral as a portal to bring the narrator into his world, helping him to “see” not only with his eyes. In the end, the narrator finally learned to “see without looking”, overcoming his prejudices.

Although the structure of the cathedral plays an important role in helping the narrator understand Robert’s way of seeing things, I believe that any structure or object that represents the belief beyond the existence would have achieved the narrator’s enlightenment of “seeing without looking”.