CATHEDRAL

Esteban De La Cruz
Professor Xilao Li
March 12, 2015
Literature 115

What interested me about people is not who they are but what they could become. In Cathedral, a short story written by Raymond Carver in 1983, we can see a perfect example of how people change. Carver’s short story is about an unnamed narrator who has an epiphany after meeting a blind guy. The story has three characters the narrator, the wife’s narrator and Frank; a blind guy. I am going to focuses on the narrator since he is the most misunderstand character of the story.

First, people criticize the narrator for been rude. They say “he does not care about his wife and the world he live in” (classmates). On the other hand, I find the narrator honest because he says what he feels. We often tell people to be honest with their feeling, but when they do it, we want an “honest” but positive reaction out of them. A blind man was going to visit him and his wife and he didn’t want that to happen. The narrator said, “I wasn’t very enthusiastic about his visit”, is something wrong with that? I think this statement is only an opinion and not a state of being. We can not make any conclusions about him taking only this line as a reference.
Other line they use to support they argument against the narrator appears in paragraph 3; in this paragraph the narrator’s wife is sharing a poem with him. The narrator said, “I can’t remember I didn’t think much of the poem. Of course, I didn’t tell her that” (para3). This line touches our feeling because we believe in a romantic and idealistic way of viewing love. I don’t think those who are married put attention to everything the wife say to them. But they want to believe that it happens in their lives. So, again, we can not judge him of been rude distant to his wife. This was the first stage. This stage Plato called, in the Republic, the stage of the images. Because what we see is not real and the judgments we do are wrong. In this case, the narrator is the stage of images because his judgments are based only in the appearance of the individuals. On the other hand, the Frank is the realm of the ideas. For him the world are not simple images without a meaning behind. For him the world is a world of transcendence ideas. So, let’s take a look to what the experts say about the narrator.

Samira Sasani wrote an essay on Cathedral for the Department of Foreign Languages, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran. For her the narrator is not rude. Instead, she believes the narrator is a man of distances. “My wife filled me in with more detail than I care to know” (para3). Her judgment has a little bit more of understanding of the character. Because, “been rude” is more about spontaneity and “been “a man of distances” is more about a state of being. The good news is that this state of being can be change at any time. The best example to support her argument is when the narrator’s wife and the blind man have a nice and interesting conversation after they had dinner. The narrator stayed outside of the conversation. He does not want to join in. And when the blind man asks him a question he answers with a simple yes or no.
“For the most part, I just listened. Now and then I join in. I didn’t want him to think I’d left the room, and I didn’t want her to think I was feeling left out. They talked of things that had happened to them-to them!-these past ten years” (Carver, Cathedral).
So, we see that is not that he is been rude, but that he is a man of distance. The cool part is that this state of being is by choice. He is been a man of distance because he wants to be seen as one. From the beginning of the story, he is aware of his state of being. He does not have any intentions to be part of the story. That makes him a man of distance.
In conclusion, what can we say about the main character, the narrator, in Cathedral? We see that he wasn’t acting rude. It was a spontaneous reaction to what was happening in his life. Also, we see that he was more a man of distance than rude. But, is there anything more we can say about this character? The answer is yes. The narrator and the blind man were watching T.V. then something happened. On T.V. a cathedral appears. The blind man asked the narrator to describe it to hi. The narrator couldn’t do it. Then the blind man had an idea “let’s make one ourselves” he said. The narrator went to his wife room to pick up a heavy paper, and he change his state of being a man of distances to a state of man of engaging.
“So I went upstairs. My legs felt like they didn’t have any
They felt like they did after I’d done some running. In my
In my wife’s room, I looked around. I found some ballpoints. In a little basket on her table, and then I tried to think where. To look for the kind of paper he was talking about” (Cathedral).

From that moment the narrator changed, and he becomes more engaged with the blind man; to the point where they drew a cathedral together. “Me and him are working” the narrator said. After they’ve done working with the drawing the narrator experiment an epiphany. But the epiphany was achieved because the choice he made: changed his state of being. But the narrator couldn’t articulate his emotions because it was something new for him. The last sentence is “it was really something”.