People’s perception of the world may be limited to their beliefs about others. People who are physically fit may undermine the abilities of the physically challenged ones without knowing that they are masters of the world. Experiencing their world can bring a profound experience to physically fit individuals and help them abandon past biased beliefs about these people. A similar circumstance is seen in Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral,” where the narrator learns a lot from his wife’s friend, who is blind and eventually changes how he sees things. One can say that “Cathedral” is about transformation from being able to look to being able to see.
The narrator’s low opinion about the ability of disabled people to live near normal life is challenged by Robert. Robert is a blind man who is a former employer and a friend to the narrator’s wife. When the narrator and Robert met for the first time, he was astonished to see that even blind people could smoke. According to the narrator, blind people cannot smoke because they cannot see smoke as they exhale it. He was also astonished that Robert could eat and drink without any challenge, just like someone with good vision. The narrator explains, “The blind man had right away located his food. He knew just where everything was on his plate. I watched him in admiration as he used his knife and fork on meat” (Carver 32). By learning these things from Robert, the narrator’s thoughts about blind people gradually began to change, and he learned that not being able to look at something does not mean that one does not perceive it. Robert could not look at the smoke, food, or glass but could smoke, eat and drink by himself. The narrator’s encounter with Robert enabled him to see things beyond how they look before his physical eyes.
Robert taught the narrator that relationships are beyond seeing the physical appearance of a person but having deeper feelings about someone. Before the arrival of Robert, the narrator’s wife explains how Robert’s wife died of cancer some years back. The narrator wonders how the two lived and even commented that the wife could wear anything because Robert could not see. Here, the narrator can be seen confusing love with physical appearance and sees no need for dressing better if one is married to a blind person. His focus on people’s physical appearance makes folly of him when he rushes to draw his wife’s robe to cover the exposed thigh, thinking that Robert will see it. He says, “I reached to draw her robe back over her, and it was then I glanced at a blind man. What the hell! I flipped the robe open again” (Carver 35). Ironically, he felt that a blind man’s wife need not wear nice clothes because the husband can’t notice it but goes on to flip her wife’s robe open because Robert cannot see her. Even as a blind man, Robert fell in love with his assistant and later married her, something that looks awkward to the narrator. Therefore, the encounter with Robert can be said to have opened his eyes to see what entails love and that physical appearance is not everything.
The narrator believed that one could never have a happy relationship with a blind person. When his wife was explaining to him how Robert’s wife died of cancer, he did not show even an iota of grief but kept on making negative compliments about the marriage. He wondered how unhappy must Robert’s wife had been because he could not see her. Here, the narrator is again seen holding the belief that a blind person cannot have a happy marriage or relationship. However, the short period they spend together opens the narrator’s eyes, and he realizes there is more to a marriage relationship than being able to see each other. The way the narrator described her wife when she came back home with Robert proves to the narrator that blind people can forge healthy relationships with other people. He says, ” I saw my wife laughing as she packed the car. I saw her get out of the car and shut the door. She was still wearing a smile” (Carver 27). The happiness of his wife proves that Robert can make a happy relationship even though he was a blind man. The narrator did not learn this immediately, but it was an important part of his transformation.
The last part transformation of the narrator can when Robert asked him to draw a cathedral. When the narrator on the television began talking about cathedrals, Robert asked the narrator to explain how they looked. The narrator was unable to explain, and Robert requested him to draw for him. Since he was blind, he placed his hand on the hand of the narrator to move with it as he drew. The narrator closed his eyes, and after some time, Robert asked him to open his eye, but he was too immersed in the new experience that he did not open them. His mind was opened, and his worldview changed. He says that “My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything” (Carver 38). The feeling that he was not inside something may symbolize his transformation from an ignorant man who does not believe in anything but himself to an enlightened person who knows that people experience the world differently. For a moment, he experienced the world like a blind man and found it so enticing that he did not want to return to his world. In this sense, the drawing of the cathedral with the blind man marked the last step of the narrator’s transformation, making him able to see being able to see rather than just look at things and make fancy conclusions.
In closing, Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” is about transformation from being able to look to be able to see. The narrator had a low opinion of blind people, and he even did not think that they were able to forge a healthy relationships with other people. However, the blind man named Robert has a healthy relationship with his wife. Robert made the narrator realize that even blind people can live normal lives like people who can see. He could eat and drink effortlessly and could smoke and put the ash on the ashtray. The narrator’s journey to being able to see rather than to look at things alone came after Robert asked him to draw a cathedral. The experience of Robert’s world was so enticing that the narrator was reluctant to return to his world. The narrator was finally a transformed man who could no longer undermine people because of physical differences.
Work Cited
Carver, Raymond.Cathedral: Stories. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
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