Catedral Raymond Carver

Cathedral

The narrator, the true, blind person of the story. Who cannot see beyond his limits and ignorance’s in life, changes through a series of events conflicted by the blind, in which sets him up in a path of self awareness and self realization. To open his horizons. To not be so mentally and emotionally close. Too look within yourself.

It starts with the wife of the narrator, who is bringing a life time friends of her, who’s wife just died and that he is going to spend the night with them at their house. At this moment the husband, who is the narrator lets you know that he is uncomfortable with the old man coming to the house and more when he realize that his is blind. The wife tells the husband how they been in touch, send audio tapes back and forth and she tell his friend Robert the blind guy how even he wrote a poem about somewhat intimate moment between both. By him touching her face. Moments later the wife goes picks to pick him up to the station and bring him to the house. The narrator lets you know of the bat how unfamiliar he is seeing and having a blind person next to him. The narrator even is mesmerized that he is not wearing black glasses. The sit in the couch have a couple of smokes. Minutes later they start eating dinner mean while the narrator is amazes of how much of how he is able to eat, even being blind. After dinner they go and sit down the couch. Then the narrator puts the T.V on to diffuse the awkwardness of silence apart. Then wife goes up to her bedroom to change clothes, while she is changing, the narrator offers him some pot, this is the turning point of the story in which I will explain later. The wife comes back downstairs and sits in the middle between both. Then this documentary about cathedrals appears and the narrator asks the blind if has ever seen one, and the blind respond that he has never seen. Then he asks him if he is religious and the husband tells him that he doesn’t believe in anything, that cathedrals don’t mean any He tells the narrator to describing with his own words how they look. Then the blind asks him if he is religious and he responds that he doesn’t believe in anything. Robert asks him if he grab a piece of paper and pencil and tells him if he can draw a cathedral. They sit at the coffee table; Robert grabs the narrator hand and tells him to close his eyes. They start drawing. The wife opens her eyes and gets shock that they are actually now interacting. He keeps drawing this cathedral and when they are almost done drawing, Robert tells him to open his eyes but he doesn’t. He keeps his eyes close. He states that he knows that he is his house but he feels like his not inside anything.

So, lets get to the point. The narrator since the beginning of the story, he lets you know that his not familiar with a blind person. Doesn’t feel confortable. Not just that, also that this unknown man has being talking to her wife more than he does in a daily basis. This is one of his first realizations, were he cannot understand their very deep ongoing conversations. She has a more fluent relationship with him that with her husband. But he is still blind and still doesn’t see it, not until later. The narrator in the beginning seems always very nervous, there is a point were he asks him in what side of the train was he sitting on, very irrelevant. The wife in the contrary, she is very calm, very open through out the story and she also wants him to feel that way. Trough out the dinner still he gives signs of self-realization and surprise of the unknown. An Example such as this one “I watched with admiration as he used his knife and fork on the meat. He’d cut two pieces of the meat, fork the meat into his mouth, and then go all out for the scalloped potatoes, the beans next, and then he’d tear off a hunk of buttered bread and

eat that.”

The conversations between both are

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