“Cathedral” by Raymond Carver

Hi, this is Lucy Liang.

I think the exploration of blindness is very interesting in this story. In the beginning of the story, our narrator had a fixed and very specific image of a blind man in his head, “[my] idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed”. (108) But very quickly, as Robert, the blind man, first appeared, he gave the narrator a shock in that “he was wearing a full beard” and “didn’t use a cane or wear dark glasses” like the narrator thought were a must for the blind. (113) Then, Robert smoked cigarettes, another unexpected thing of a blind. The image of a blind man that our narrator originally had is broken down, bit by bit, blurring the definition of what being blind means. By the end of the story, Robert leads the narrator to see something that he had never seen before. It is hard to say who is actually blind, and who is not. Looking back at the beginning of the story, the narrator was making such careless and judgmental statements about people who he doesn’t even know, and when he tries to describe a cathedral, all he could say was the structure he could see with his eyes, but nothing else. He is actually blind in a sense that he is constrained by the images that appear before his eyes.