Cathedral

When I first saw the title "Cathedral", I expected the setting to be an actual cathedral. The image of a medieval church actually conjured up images of Victor Hugo's novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I distinctly remember Hugo taking the liberty (but admittedly a difficult one for me) of describing Paris in every way you could imagine, including the cathedral where Quasimodo lived. But as for "Cathedral" it was an "okay" story, meaning that I didn't feel as impressed with it as I would, say, Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil" or Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death". It seemed to have ordinary characters in an ordinary setting. A blind man named Robert basically comes over to stay at a married couple's house in Conneticut. The wife used to work for Robert in Seattle and she seems to be very fond of him, telling him about her first, failed marriage to an army officer, even once allowing him to touch her face (par.2). This incites jealousy in the narrattor who is also the second husband. When he speaks about his wife's past, he is using the past tense. When the main plot happens, he begins to use the present tense. When Robert arrives, the husband and wife have dinner with him and also smoke pot together. Robert helps the husband draw a picture of a cathedral they were discussing in the livingroom, yet the husband never opens his eyes to see what they drew together. I honestly believe the husband is the main character in the story even though Robert at first feels like the central character. Robert seems to be the husband's antagonist simply because the husband uses repetition to sarcastically describe how caught up in Robert his wife is. He does not think highly of Robert. He even says outright that Beulah (Robert's former wife) and Robert were fools to have a church wedding to celebrate their marriage: "It was a little wedding-who'd want to go to such a wedding in the first place?" (par.16). Overall, it seems that the husband is a judgmental person. Yet I believe he is this way because he is not confident in himself deep down. He seems to have a bad relationship with his wife, for they get into a brief argument about how he has little friends, not to mention the fact that his wife hardly ever talks to him. After he gives a decent account of what a cathedral looks like, the husband puts himself down by saying: "...I can't tell you what a cathedral looks like" (par. 107). Robert encourages him to keep drawing even though he feels like he cannot do it. He says that the experience drawing with Robert was the best that had happened to him so far. Yet he never looks to see what he draws. Part of me thinks he dosen't want to see the messy job he and Robert did because he thinks it will be more respectful to Robert due to his blindness. But I believe it is more so because he is simply unconfident in anything he does.

Works Cited: Carver, Raymond. "Cathedral." The Norton Introduction to Literature. Eds. Alison Booth and Kelly J. Mays. 10th ed. New York, London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2011. 32-44.