Cathedral--Krista Smathers

The most intriguing part of this story to me was the narrator's gradual transformation and how it was described.  In the beginning, the narrator is very wary and rude about his wife's friend coming to visit.  He provides narration that sounds ignorant and shallow.  As the story moves along, readers become more and more acquainted with how Robert and the narrator's wife met and how their relationship developed.  The husband does not understand this until the very end when Robert tells him to close his eyes while drawing the cathedral.  The narrator seems like a straight forward, concrete, stubborn kind of person, and the very end of the story figuratively breaks down these walls.  Running with this analogy, in the last several lines he says, "I was in my house.  I knew that.  But I didn't feel like I was inside anything."  I interpreted this to mean that the narrator's emphasis on visual conceptions had been weakened, and because he could not see the house around him, he felt free from its constraints and in the bigger picture, free from the constraints of solely visual representations.