A World Of Vision

While fully able to view and sense the world, does one truly see it in its full color and glory, or in a mere black and white? Without emotion and devotion, the world can possibly be perceived as flat, as if with an edge where a ship could just fall off where the horizon ends. In Cathedral, the narrator has all of his senses intact but still sees the world in a very sterile manner. A visitor named Robert, a blind man, comes to town and brings the narrator great discomfort, but soon the narrator finds out that Robert has helped him refresh his view on life and the world.

In this short story by Raymond Carver, the cathedral symbolizes the epiphany that the close-minded narrator has. It sets his mind free from past judgmentalism and gives meaning to his life so that he can differentiate what his eyes are showing him and the symbolic meaning the sights hold.

Throughout this short story, the narrator is perceived as a simple man that is stuck in his own close-minded ways.

The fact that the narrator has formed all of his ideas regarding blindness “from the movies” suggests that he is complacently ignorant. He concluded that “the blind moved slowly and never laughed”, so he “wasn’t enthusiastic about (Robert’s) visit… And his being blind bothered (him)”. He is apathetic to anyone that is different than him, and a moral person would not be bothered by such a minute detail. His ignorance also translates into how he sees people, objects, and the entire world around him.

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He has become brutish because of his lack of emotion and sensibility. When the narrator starts to become comfortable with talking to Robert, his wife falls asleep and “her robe had slipped away from her legs, exposing a juicy thigh”. The narrator gets extremely angry because he does not want another man to see his wife.

Once he realizes again that Robert is blind, he thinks“ what the hell!… (and) flipped the robe open again”. This action shows what a primitive mind the narrator has. Even though the blind man does not know what is happening, Robert finds a way to belittle him just for the entertainment of himself. This further highlights how brutish and ignorant the narrator is. Towards the end of this short story, the narrator has an epiphany when drawing a cathedral which shows him a deeper meaning of the world. Robert asks the narrator to describe a cathedral but the narrator cannot get past the simple characteristics. He views a cathedral as just another grand building made out of mortar and brick – and nothing more.

Nonetheless, when the narrator starts to draw the cathedral with Robert, he finds himself being entranced by the most massive to the most miniscule details that envelop a cathedral. This catalyzes the narrator to see beyond his close-minded ways. When he is done drawing, his “eyes were still closed, yet he knew that he was still with the blind man and his wife inside of his house. He felt something much more significant than anything he’d ever felt: a feeling where he did not belong to or know anything, almost placeless. As the narrator reaches this epiphany, he thinks to himself “it’s really something”. The something that he is feeling is the new world that he is apart of. A cathedral offers the world a gathering place to find consolation and to worship, and now the narrator can feel and see the world with a new meaning: he can empathize and read inbetween the lines to analyze the world in a much more profound way then what his eyes show him.

In Cathedral by Raymond Carver, the cathedral teaches the close-minded narrator how to set his mind free from past judgment. This gives meaning to his life because he can now analyze what his eyes are showing him which explains what these sights truly mean. The narrator goes from being a simple man who sees everything in black and white to a person who can analyze more deeply the story of the world and read between the lines. The idea of being able to see past what is visual teaches a person how to empathize. As seen, the narrator lacked empathy and understanding of Robert. With his new found empathy, the narrator is able to feel for Robert and can now be apart of a new world: a world where things appear with greater meaning.