This is illustrated through the narrator’s inability to understand his wife and her “poems” and Roberts ability to do so. He brings to the foreground the idea of sight being the handicap rather then blindness.
Through the interaction between them, Carver address societies misconception of vision and its connection with knowledge. Carver uses the narrator to represent an individual who sees but cannot “see” and Robert as one who can “see” but lacks the ability to see. As the night wears on the narrator challenges Robert’s blindness in all sorts of ways-drinking, smoking cigarettes dope, and turning on the TV-which leads to their drawing of the cathedral and the narrator’s “awakening.”Ĭarver develops the two main characters in his story to be completely contrasted to each other, in these characters not only does sight and blindness become conflicted with each other but also does the issue of knowledge. His preconceived notions of blindness gradually start to crumble as he spends more time with Robert and realizes how “normal” he is. The establishment of “Robert” who “didn’t use a cane and didn’t ware dark glasses” surprised him-going against the conventions that he had always believed seeing this begins the process of humanizing the blind man and the idea of blindness to the narrator (723). As the story progresses the narrator finally meets the blind man who is introduced to him as Robert-before this, the speaker merely refers to Robert as “the blind man”. “It beyond understanding” how anyone can exist in such an incomplete existence and thus is much deserved of his pity (722). All without having ever seen what the goddamned woman looked like” baffles the narrator (722). Just knowing that the blind man had a wife who he “lived, worked, slept -had sex-and then bur.
Blindness seems especially abnormal to us because vision plays such a heavy role in our everyday “normal” lives not seeing equates to not being able to truly understand and experience the beauties of life. The uneasiness experienced by the narrator at the prospect of “ blind man in house” is a representation of the prejudices and fears that we often face when exposed and forced to deal with strange and foreign things (720). As well, he addresses the barriers imposed by the human tendency to rely on vision as the sole means of experiencing the world.Īt the beginning of the story, the narrator’s perception on blind people as individuals who “moved slowly and never laughed” reflect not only his but also the views generally shared by society (720). By juxtaposing his two male characters, Carver is able to effectively explore sight and its seemingly simplistic relationship with learning and knowledge. In Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral”, the conventional ideas often associated with blindness and sight are challenged.
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