Analysis Of My Dear Husband By Robert Carver

The narrators statement at the very beginning of the story explains his own lack of knowledge about physical blindness. His lack of knowledge relating to the visitor’s disability is not deniable, yet he makes it very clear that he is aware of his ignorance, saying that he was not happy about his visit. “He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me. My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed. Sometimes seeing-eye dogs led them. A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to.” (90) These statements explain his entire attitude about Robert, the house guest, and other blind people in general at the onset of the story, giving the narrator an instant feeling of exactly who the narrator and even what he may turn out to be. While there are many undertones concerning other things about which he is

He is always focused on his wife, and even though it is not his ideal of a perfect marriage he does seem to love and admire his wife as if it was. He is capable of telling us a lot of details about his wife without ever calling her out or even trying to persuade us to dislike her. His love for her makes it possible for the narrator to get past his dislike of Robert, and allow him to stay in his house. Even after all the dislike he shares with us in the very beginning of the story. He comes into the kitchen to talk to his wife, and tries his best to be a nice guy about the topic of the blind guest which is a much different view from earlier. This persuades us to look at the narrator in his wife's perspective, even though we have knowledge that she doesn't about the narrators anxiety over Robert. Another large detail we have over the wife is that the narrator is jealous of Robert and is just using his blindness as a scapegoat. However, even though this extreme case of jealousy is unhealthy for their relationship, the narrator, in his own way, tells his wife he loves her. When his wife tells him "If you love me... you can do this for me. If you don't love me, okay." he does exactly that and tries to make Robert comfortable (Carver 107).

The narrator is pre-judgemental towards all people who are blind, whether or not he has met them. He believes all blind people are the same as those he has watched in movies. The narrator perception of the blind is that they “moved slowly and never laughed” and when they went out “they were led by seeing eye-dogs” (Carver 104). The movie industry creates a false image of the blind, which leads to the narrator’s assumptions. However, the blind are not all the same, just like how everyone else in the world are not the same. People are designed to be different in their personalities, thoughts, looks and much more. The narrator’s ideas of Robert are based off of false conceptions and this changes his attitude towards Robert. The narrator already has strong feelings towards Robert before meeting him

As soon as the story begins, we are told that the narrator is not happy about the upcoming visit from his wife’s blind friend, Robert. The narrator states “I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit,” “[Robert] being blind bothered me”, and “a blind

The beginning of the story presents the narrator’s wife working for a blind man one summer by reading, “stuff to him, case studies, reports, that sort of thing” (Carver, 34). She eventually extends an invitation for the blind man, Robert, to stay at their house after Robert’s wife had passed away. The narrator was not too happy about having a stranger stay in his home by stating, “I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me. My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed” (Carver, 34). The narrator seems very timid about someone he had never met stay at his house who can see purely nothing. This gives off an impression that the narrator doesn’t want to have Robert stay with him because he will be a hassle to keep up with since blind people in the “movies” progress, “slowly and never

In Ben Johnson’s “To the Memory of My Beloved, The Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us”, Johnson dictates a dramatically sycophantic poem in honor of the late William Shakespeare. With his superficial, dramatic style, Johnson unveils his own envious attitude within the unbegotten admiration he appoints throughout the poem. By complimenting Shakespeare through this ironic voice, Johnson insincerely praises Shakespeare’s legacy in a clever attempt to highlight Shakespeare’s minute but mentionable flaws. Throughout the commemorational poem, Johnson cleverly praises Shakespeare’s seemingly incomparable success as a poet by incorporating other famous poets as a belittling contrast. While meant as a friendly coup de grâce, Johnson’s assessment of Shakespeare is Johnson’s ultimate attempt to align himself with Shakespeare, bearing praise unto himself as well. In a poem meant to highlight and enunciate Shakespeare’s unparalleled skill and talent, Johnson instead attempts to expose his faults in hopes of bringing Shakespeare closer to himself.

Throughout the middle of the story, the narrator is discriminatory towards blind people but suddenly feels the need to make Robert feel comfortable just because it will please his wife. The narrator and his wife were in the kitchen talking, and then the wife says “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” (116). To show that her husband is still prejudice towards blind people, he replies and says “I don’t have any blind friends” (116) which gets his wife upset because Robert is her friend. When the narrator says that he does not have any

While Bub and Robert start off having their own differences, Bub’s wife and Robert have a connection that Bub cannot grasp the understanding of. Though Bub and Raymond Carver trying to learn about their own blindness, and what it is like to be able to see what is beyond visible. Bub blindness is becoming very aware; both emotionally and psychologically, and ignorance towards the feeling of others. As Robert first comes to visit Bub says “I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit” (Carver 1).

The TV is initially a symbol of the narrator’s disconnection to life and the people around him. When he turns on the TV, it is to put an end to the dinner and the social interactions that he finds uncomfortable: “Finally, when I thought he was beginning to run down, I got up and turned on the TV” (Carver 7). The TV functions as a filler and means of distraction, initially. As the story progresses, the symbolism of the TV shifts, as it becomes a link between the narrator and Robert. The narrator finds himself compelled to describe what is going on: “I waited as long as I could. Then I felt I had to say something” (Carver 10). In this moment, a connection begins to be established in a new way, and the TV functions as a bridge between the blind man and the narrator who can see. The TV is what leads to the cathedral, which is also symbolic. Cathedrals are holy places, where people worship God and sometimes have transcendent experiences. It is through drawing the cathedral that the narrator finally has his own transcendent epiphany, resembling a mystical experience. He says, “My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything” (Carver 13). Something religious has happened to him, and it can be argued that the sense of not being “inside anything” is comparable to the overwhelming sense of awe that someone might feel inside an incredible cathedral. The not being “inside anything” is also a form of freedom. The narrator realizes that blindness is not the limited prison that he previously believed it to

This seems to unsettle the husband, as he notices that his wife has a stronger connection with Robert than they have in their marriage. The husband is blind to his wife’s feelings and needs in their relationship, and this lack of communication between them has affected their marriage. His wife wrote a poem about her experience with the blind man touching her face, and he brushed it off by stating that, “[He] can remember not thinking much about the poem” (33). The blind man however acts as an outlet for the wife to vent about her feelings which forms a close bond between the two. Robert can understand the speaker’s wife in a way that the speaker clearly is not able to. The narrator mentions that he believes Robert’s wife, Beluah, must have led a miserable life because she, “could never see herself as she was seen in the eyes of her loves one. A woman who could never go on day after day and never receive the smallest compliment from her beloved” (34). He believes that the blind man’s wife must have suffered due to his inability to see her, yet the narrator has never even truly seen his own wife. Robert’s friendship with the speaker’s wife is what his own marriage is lacking due to not being able to recognize that his wife needs an emotional connection with him.

The story opens with the narrator giving a background of his wife and Robert. Immediately, it is easy for the audience to form a negative opinion about the narrator. Within the first paragraph of the story he says, “I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me” (Carver 33). This exemplifies his pre-formed opinion about Robert even though he hardly knows anything about him. He clearly is uncomfortable with the fact that Robert is blind, mainly based on his lack of exposure to people with disabilities. The narrator is very narrow-minded for most of this story, making it easy to initially dislike him.

To My Dear and Loving Husband by Anne Bradstreet If ever two were one, then surely we. If ever man were loved by wife, then thee; If ever wife was happy in a man, Compare with me ye women if you can.

The author analyzes and speculates the story in a very different way. He mentions many speculations that he comes up with in his analysis. From a speculation about Carver is an alcoholic due to the drinking habit of the narrator in Carver’s short story to a speculation about the narrator’s wife was just as awkward as her husband when she first met the blind man. The author even has an out-of-the-box thinking about the way Carver uses names in this story due to the fact that there are only two names are used in the entire story, Robert and Beulah. He speculates that only the narrator’s wife calls the blind man by his name “Robert”, because she want to make a point that they know each other well despite the fact that she no longer knows him. The author also adds that by doing so the narrator’s wife hopes that she’ll be able to understand and reconnect with the blind man again. In the end, the author ends his analysis on Carver’s writing style because he thinks that the story could be much more interesting if Carver doesn’t use the chronological way to tell the

In the beginning of the story, the husband, who is the narrator of “Cathedral,” seems to be a very ignorant, uncaring man. Nesset wrote “Walled in by his own insecurities and prejudices, this narrator is sadly out of touch with his world and with himself, buffered by drink and pot and by the sad reality, as his wife puts it, that he has no ‘friends’” (Nesset 124). The narrator has no connection to himself or the outside world. He has no friends, as his wife points out, which goes to show he keeps to himself, but he still doesn’t fully understand who “himself” is, because he doesn’t have that connection to himself, thus leading to the drinking and drugs. He wasn’t used to change, so having a visitor come over to his house bothered him. The moment he saw Robert, the narrator began to change. When his wife pulled up with the blind man in the car and they got out of the car, he saw that Robert had a beard and he thought to himself, “This blind man, feature this, he was wearing a full beard! A beard on a blind man! Too much, I say” (Carver 35). The narrator had expected to see the blind man in the way they showed them in the movies, but now that his idea of who Robert was as a person was being challenged, the change started to appear. Robert, who is a static character, is very essential in the change of the narrator. It is because Robert is the way he is, his marrying of a colored woman, his travels around the

Love cannot be defined in one sentence or even a paragraph. Every human has his or her own definition of love because people usually define love based on their cultures, backgrounds, social classes, educations, and their societies. In this essay, the main point will be the different kinds of love that Carver illustrates in his story “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love.” In Carver’s story, there are some points that I can relate to my personal experience. There are a few characteristics and symbols in the story that are really important to understand in order to define what a real love is and find the intention thrown out the story. These characteristics includes, Mel, Terri and Ed and Terri’s relationship. Furthermore, symbols