Robert's Blindness

Robert and the narrator are watching a television documentary on cathedrals, hence the title, and Robert asks “…maybe you could describe one to me?” (188), because he understands what the purpose of cathedrals is, but he has no idea what they look like. The narrator attempts to describe a cathedral, but he does not know how to “…even begin to describe it.” (188). The cathedral means nothing to him, and he admits to Robert that when it comes to religion: “’I guess I don’t believe in it. In anything. Sometimes it’s hard.’” (189). When Robert suggests that they draw a cathedral together, hand over hand, the narrator becomes nervous and cautious, he is unsure what do. After a little bit, the narrator became more comfortable and “…couldn’t stop” drawing (190). The narrator then closes his eyes to finish off the drawing, and at that moment with Robert, he metaphorically opens his eyes. He does not exactly know what happened, but he knows something positively changed, he felt like “it [was] really something.” (190). He has an out of body experience, “…I didn’t feel like I was inside anything” (190), an epiphany. Carver does not entirely explain the ending or what happens next, but one can be optimistic and assume that Robert changed the narrator for the better, by making him close his eyes to

In the story, “Cathedral,” written by Raymond Carver he is illustrating stereotypes by displaying the narrator’s reaction to meeting Robert. Throughout the story the narrator illustrates how or what blind people do and how they live their lives. The narrator says, “I’d always though dark glasses are a must for the blind” (Carver,144). Before Robert arrived to his home he already made many different assumptions about him. The narrator did not understand how a blind person lived.

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

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).

When Robert first arrives, things are a little awkward. The narrator isn’t sure what to say to Robert. As the night goes on they share many drinks, eat dinner, and even smoke some dope. Even the simple concept of smoking weed was one of the first real connections the narrator and Robert had. The narrator, seeing that Robert wanted to smoke some dope with him might have made him feel more comfortable and think Robert as just an normal, easy-going man. Once the wife falls asleep on the couch, we begin to see how Robert begins to open up the narrators eyes. Robert is an insightful and compassionate man who takes the time to truly listen to others , which helps him to “see” them better than he could with his eyes. These are qualities that the narrator is strongly lacking which start to inspire him to change. The only thing on television is a documentary about cathedrals the narrator wonders if Robert knows what a cathedral looks like so he asks him. Roberts asks him to describe the cathedral for him, because he can’t picture one. “I stared hard at the shot of the cathedral on the TV. How could I even begin to describe it? But say my life

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.

When the narrator’s wife tells the narrator that Robert recently lost his wife, he thinks that it is a tragedy that Robert’s wife was “a woman whose husband could never read the expression on her face” (Carver 70). This proposition sounds atrocious to the narrator, because he and the other men of the other stories are “used to determining their masculinity through the eyes of other men” (Kimmel). Moreover, the insecurity of the male narrator is demonstrated by his apprehension of Robert, for whom his wife once worked. The narrator is clearly uncomfortable having the Robert in his house. Although he claims that this is because Robert is blind, it is rather obvious that it is due to the fact that the narrator fears that Robert is a rival for his wife and thus, will usurp his masculinity (Benson). However, the narrator soon realizes what it really means to be blind. As a result, he no longer feels threatened by Robert and therefore is not insecure about his masculinity. In fact, when the narrator’s wife falls asleep on the couch with her robe open and showing “a juicy thigh”, at first, the narrator “draw[s] her robe back over her” (Carver 71). However, after he glances at the blind man, and realizes that the he is no longer an intimidation, he “flip[s] the robe open again” (Carver 71). In other words, the narrator does not care that his wife probably would rather not be showing “a juicy thigh.” He would only consider the decency of his wife if he felt the another man was threatening his masculinity. Moreover, once the narrator is no longer insecure, he is actually able to connect with Robert, without fearing that Robert will steal his wife. The narrator agrees to help Robert understand what a cathedral is. Because the narrator’s insecurity is only present when the narrator believes that Robert will emasculate him, the occurrences of the story

Through the author's use of diction, more aspects of the narrator's personality are revealed. Simply from word choice, we learn that the narrator is prejudicial towards others, and jealous of other men's relationships with his wife. When facing the situation of Robert coming to town to visit his wife, the narrator blatantly expresses that "a blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to" (Carver 209). This repeated substitution of "blind man"

The narrator quickly falls out of the conversation; however, he highlights that even though he does not enjoy Robert’s presence, he does not want to be perceived as rude by him. He explains how every “now and then [he] joined in [the conversation. He] didn’t want [Robert] to think [he’d] left the room.” By listening to the chatting between his wife and Robert, the narrator begins to think of Robert as a “blind jack-of-all-trades,” and he starts to feel jealous of the relationship that his wife and Robert share. The main reason behind the narrator’s resentment is due to his lack of a healthy relationship with his wife; the narrator even points out how he “waited in vain to hear [his] name on [his] wife’s sweet lips [during her conversation with Robert]...But [he] heard none of the sort.” The palpable tension between the couple along with the discomfort that Robert creates causes the narrator to feel out of place in his own home.

The conflict between the narrator and his wife helps the theme in the story. In the story before Robert, arrived the wife was very frustrated with the narrator because of his failure to cooperate. She said “If you love me... you can do this for me…” From that quote one can tell that Robert visit was very important to the wife, and she just wanted everything to go smooth for Robert. Throughout the entire story the narrator was saying slick things, and being very indirect toward Robert and his wife. The narrator

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

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.

This short story interested me in a way no other story has. Have you ever met a visually impaired individual in your life? If not church gives you the storyteller's perspective from a man who has never met a visually impaired individual. Through the spouse's words and activities when he is managing Robert, the visually impaired man, we can see that the spouse does not "see" or comprehend what Robert's visual deficiency means or how it changes or does not transform him as a person. At first Robert makes the spouse exceptionally uncomfortable, for the spouse does not comprehend what to say or do around the visually impaired guest. As the story advances, we can see an adjustment in the spouse; he is by all accounts ready to consider Robert to

The narrator describes in detail how his wife is happy and smiling as she is talking to Robert, but when she “finally took her eyes off the blind man and looked at me. I had the feeling she didn’t like what she saw” (Carver 278). He even begins to get jealous that his doesn’t even mention him as she tells her life story. “I waited in vain to hear my name on my wife’s

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