Guide Dog and Walking Stick

People think of blind people, they tend to picture a person with dark sunglasses, a seeing “eye dog”, and a walking stick. These are stereotypes and obviously do not remain true in the case of all blind people. It is impossible to know absolutely what is going on in another person’s life, so to judge others is simply ignorance. Moreover, not all sight people can see and realize all that they are looking. These ideas the author develops in the short story ‘Cathedral’.

Raymond Carver uses the character development, symbolism to show the difference between the ability to look and see through human connection. The author uses the narrator’s character in the short story to show changes in the man mind about blind people. The narrator’s characteristics are relayed indirectly through impression and attitude. Throughout the story, the narrator’s character develops, because of his vision of Robert and blindness changes by the end of the story.

Robert is an old friend of his wife who arrived at their house and the husband has stereotypical thoughts about blind people, he imagined that all blind people wear glasses and used canes, but when he looks at Robert where “…didn’t use a cane and he didn’t wear dark glasses”, he was confused.

With these ideas, it made it clear how unaware he was about blind people. It seemed as though he believed that blind people didn’t have much to do with their lives. He admitted that his opinion about blind people was wrong and he states, “l remembered having read somewhere that the blind didn’t smoke because, as speculation had it, they couldn’t see the smoke they exhaled (1320).

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Nonetheless, this blind man smoked cigarettes one after another one. Therefore, many of the ideas that the narrator thought about blind people were inaccurate, and as a result, a husband begins to be able to see more.

Also, he shows that he is afraid to be forgotten as he states, “Now and then I joined in. I didn’t want him to think I’d left the room, and I didn’t want her to think I felt left out” (1321). This situation is a good example why the man is jealous of Robert because he was waiting when his wife mentioned his name, but they just talk about themselves. He states, “They talked of things that had happened to them—to them!—these past ten years. I waited in vain to hear my name on my wife’s sweet lips….But I heard nothing of the sort’ (1321). The most important change to the husband was when his wife left the room and went upstairs for some time. It seems husband doesn’t want to stay alone with a blind man. The narrator has big challenges because he feels obligated to talk to the Robert and explain what is on the TV show. This is a significant experience for the narrator because narrator changes his thoughts about Robert and opens up to him; therefore, he begins feels more comfortable with him.

Carver displays symbol in short story “Cathedral”. A cathedral symbolizes a place where people express their spirituality. However, Carver displays the cathedral as a beauty secular spirituality. In this short story, when two men watch TV, the blind man asks the narrator to describe him how cathedral looks. The husband is can not to describe it with enough detail to the blind man, because he doesn’t understand the meaning of the building. He is not a religious person and he watches a program on TV just because he has nothing else to watch. In short story, the blind man asks the husband draw a cathedral with each other to better visualize it. “He found my hand, the hand with the pen. He closed his hand over my hand” and they start drawing together on a piece of paper. Robert is simply able to imagine it in his mind, but a husband needs some time to understand that he is able really too see it now, not just look on it. Moreover, now in process of drawing, he is not only able to see, but he can understand the meaning of it. Because he claims, “it was like nothing else in my life up to now…my eyes were still closed”.

As result, the narrator begins to understand the purpose of the cathedral that it symbolizes the struggle that people tried to show in this building. This experience with Robert changes narrator when Robert asks a man to open his eyes he prefers to leave them close. Before he was looking at the things on the TV show and was not really see it and he realized how blind he was. But through this process of the blind man and husband drawing together, narrator recognizes that he is able to see and describes the cathedral, even his eyes closed. Also, the inability husband to understand the purpose of the cathedrals shows that he lacks creativity, and his life is meaningless and not satisfied. The first thing what he thinks when they start drawing is his house: ‘I drew a box that looked like my house’ (1325). The transformation of the house into a cathedral is a very powerful image.

His house and he deduced the symbolism of the cathedral. And ‘What’s a cathedral without people?’ he said (1325). Characterized as a social place where people meet, the cathedral becomes a symbol of the husband’s ability to overcome his loneliness and his inability to communicate. In addition, the symbolism of the cathedral is also related to Robert. His question, if the husband is a religious person, is almost a rhetorical question, because he already knows that this is not so. The author shows that a blind person is a very strong person because his blindness shows his different feelings from others people. He sees things from a special opinion and becomes a person who can share a different approach to wisdom, another input into knowledge. For the husband, Robert at the beginning was as no one, and after they meet each other and communicate he becomes someone special.

In conclusion, Carver uses character development and symbolism in his short story “Cathedral” to display theme. The main character in the story is a narrator who can’t truly see the world from a big perspective and don’t really understands how life can be happy and significant. In contrast, the blind man is the one who is blind physically but he is able truly to see things that his husband can’t. Carver shows that literal blindness is less harmful than emotional blindness. During the short story, the author shows a dig developing the narrator’s character through human connection. A husband changes his thought, vision, and attitude about a blind man and he became a more open person. Also, the symbolism of the cathedral display that not all sight people can really see and realize even they look on it. Overall, the author Raymond Carver in short story “Cathedral” uses literature element to represent the development narrator character trough human connection.