Three Days To See By Helen Kellar Essay

Sometimes we have to look beyond what we see on the outside to understand something more deeply. In the short story Cathedral By Raymond Carver, the narrator has an attitude of being selfish, and jealous through the story. The narrator’s wife invites a blind man, Robert, to come stay in their house for a short time while the man visits family members of his own wife who recently passed. The narrator is not enthusiastic because blind people make the narrator uncomfortable, mainly because the narrator has no real experience with the blind. In addition, to his uneasiness with the blind the narrator is uncomfortable with the relationship his wife and the blind man have. The wife and Robert, the blind man, have maintained a close

“Helen became an "ambassador for the blind," raising money and lobbying for the sightless. From her first trip to Japan in 1937 until her retirement, she made nine tours around the world and visited 34 countries.” Everywhere she went Helen inspired people with her incredible story and her campaigns for the better treatment of the blind. Keller once said, “‘A person who is severely impaired never knows his hidden sources of strength until he is treated like a normal human being and encouraged to shape his own life.’” The speeches she gave helped people to understand how to treat those with disabilities. It helped them to realize that they are just normal human beings. Keller’s tours around the world greatly improved the lives of people with

Helen Keller was a social activist throughout the late 1800s and much of the 1900s for the deaf and blind. She went blind and deaf at a young age from a disease but learned how to communicate with the world. She went to Horace Mann School for the Deaf, Wright-Humason School for the Deaf, and Cambridge School for Young Ladies for college. On June 23, 1953, Keller gave a speech at the National University of Mexico to promote rights for the blind specifically. Helen Keller effectively convinces her audience blind people need equal rights through the use of repetition and emotional appeals.

Blindness is not limited to physical manifestation. In Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” the figurative blindness is immediately apparent through the narrator and his shallowness, irrational jealousy, and egotistical personality. His dismissive behavior and ignorance towards the feelings of Robert, his wife’s blind friend, speak negatively of his character and reveals his insecurities. While the narrator’s emotional blindness and Robert’s physical blindness initially inhibits their bond, it eventually leads the narrator to an epiphany and the beginning of a character transformation. The different forms of blindness allow the characters to bond and grow over the course of the story.

Carver is well known for his short stories and poetries. Among his works, “Cathedral” is considered one of the best, favorite, and most optimistic and the most developed. Carver’s story revolves around the theme of seeing and looking. Most people believed they could not live without cathedrals which brought them closer to their God. Similarly, people place so much importance to the physical eyesight and tend to think they can hardly live without it. Robert, a blind man, is invited to the narrator’s home and the narrator is shown troubled by Roberts’s disability. Later on, the narrator is amazed to see the blind smoking despite having even thought of helping him with his drink earlier on (Carver 516- 524). The latter brought to attention that as much as natural looking is essential, more essential is the ability to see or to visualize things. The writer explains that it might be tougher to be without eyesight; however, it is possible to live without it and make the best of what else one has, more so the brain. Visualizing brings out a better view of the significance of life and things surrounding us.

The use of symbolism such as the physical and emotional meanings of blindness can describe different meanings behind elements of the story. In the critical essay, the author discusses why an author might choose to make a character bling and what it means. Diane Andrews Henningfeld, the author of the critical essay explains, “clearly the author wants to emphasize other levels of sight and blindness beyond physical.” Blindness can be more than just the levels of physical sight and the author wants that to be understood. The author wants to emphasize and make it very clear that other levels of sight and blindness exist like not seeing the beauty in life and being blind to it beyond just being able to see with your eyes. The quote can feel something about the characters traits and how they can be so opposite from their physical abilities. This quote Conveys the facts. People can see in different ways. It is stated that,“although he is blind, he ‘sees’ how to get along with others in profound and important ways. By contrast, the narrator, although sighted, does not see how his isolation damages himself, his wife, and their relationship. He is

For Helen Keller, the hardest thing in her life was being blind and deaf, but she didn’t let that stop

People who are blind face many different problems in accomplishing everyday activities and becoming an independent individual. Some are able to overcome this issue while others struggle through it in their lives. In “Helen Keller’s Address before the New York Association for the Blind, January 15, 1907” she makes an appeal to the audience that the blind should be helped and made independent so that they can stand up and support themselves. She uses pathos or emotionally packed words, examples and anecdotes and cites from a prominent source to convince her audience that the blind are not helpless, but they are in need of guidance from people who can see in order to live and thrive independently.

She discusses those who have recently acquired the ability to see and how this affects how they interpret the new world around them. With no preconceived knowledge or ideas about what they are seeing, “vision is pure sensation unencumbered by meaning” (24). While our minds use what we already know to interpret and comprehend what we see, those who see for the first time have no previous knowledge telling them what they are looking at. Their minds are blank canvases, interpreting each line, shape, and shadow, attempting to piece every aspect of what their eyes are seeing to understand the full picture. While we would simply glance at an object, allowing our mind to fill in the details of what we are seeing based on the image we already have in our minds, the newly sighted do not have the ability to see in concepts as we do. Most of us cannot “remember ever having seen without understanding” (27) yet we still have the ability to learn how to see like this to an extent. Artistic talent aside, upon asking a newly sighted person and an artistically untrained person who had been seeing their whole life to draw the same object, the newly sighted person would have the ability to draw what they were truly seeing while the average person would draw what they knew they were seeing, ignoring the true shape and shadows of the object in front of them. Upon asking someone who has been trained

Who else can there be? Helen Keller, the amazing author who was both blind and dead at 19 months old. She lives most of her life struggling and stressing out, not being able to do much. She was the first disable person to graduate school and even received a Bachelor of Art Degree. But she didn’t do it all alone. Her teacher, Anne Sullivan, contributed to her success. She taught Helen the manual alphabet, hand writing, and other forms of communication and understanding,"I learned to spell in this uncomprehending way a great many words, among them pin, hat, cup and a few verbs like sit, stand and walk. But my teacher had been with me several weeks before I understood that everything has a name.” Anne and her husband helped Keller with her first book, the autobiography, “The Story of My Life”. After her success, she wrote more books and inspired other disabled people to do things in life and paved a path for

The novel “Tangerine”, written by Edward Bloor, is a realistic-fiction novel that focuses on the motif of sight, and how what’s on the surface isn’t the same as what’s beneath. The motif of sight plays the part of showing that just because someone has glasses doesn’t mean that they can’t see, but they can sometimes see better than other people. Through the motif of sight, Paul, the main character, has a growing understanding of his friends, his family, and himself.

1) According to Dillard, lovers and the knowledgeable can see well. Yet she also suggests that those who are knowledgeable on a topic, such as people who have been blind from birth and can suddenly see (due to an opperation), can perhaps view more objectively the world around them, and see it in a way that those with vision from birth cannot. Infants, she says, can see very clearly, for they are viewing the world for the first time, and can observe the colors and the light with no prejudgments, but we forget this experience as we grow older, and only occasionally catch glimpses of this phenomenon.

America’s First Lady of Courage and Picturing History both presented individuals who faced many challenges. Helen Keller, the main focus of the first article, struggled with deafness as well as blindness, while Mathew Brady struggled financially. In the case of Helen Keller, the article stated that, “Helen’s parents knew they had to do something about her wild behavior. They hired Annie Sullivan to tutor her.” This was a critical moment in Helen’s life, as Annie helped Helen to learn how to more appropriately communicate with others as well as be able to spread the word that those who struggle with various disabilities could still manage to do great things.

The Helen Keller National Center had four different collaborations. These organizations in collaboration with HKNC were the American Association of the Deaf-Blind (AADB), Texas Tech University, Gallaudet University, and the American Foundation for the Blind to make this training possible. There were two women, Suzanne Ressa from HKNC, and Amy Parker - a former HKNC regional representative and graduate from Texas Tech University with an Ed.D. - that led the trainings. Lastly, there were six DeafBlind young adults who participated. These participants were from all over the United States. These individuals were Jason Corning from Wisconsin, Kelvin Crosby from California, Virginia Jordan from Georgia, Crystal Morales from Texas, and Divya Goel and George Stern from Florida (Deaf-Blind Young Adults in Action,

The story “Cathedral” demonstrates that lack of sight does not necessarily prevent one from perceiving things as they are, or live their life to the fullest. In the story, a middle-age blind man, who is a friend to the narrator’s wife, and used to be her boss at one point, visits the narrator and his wife. The narrator has never interacted with blind people before, and all he knew about blind people was what he had seen on television. Blind people are stereotypically portrayed on television as slow moving, dull people, who never laugh. Based on this perception, the narrator was reluctant to meet the blind man and doubted whether they were going to connect. This is evident when the narrator states, “I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me” (Carver 1).