A Rose For Emily And Cathedral Analysis

“You can't judge an album by a single song; it's like judging a book by only reading a single chapter” Trevor Rabin. Although the short stories Cathedral and A Rose for Emily have completely different plots, they both have morals that are described in this quote. Cathedral follows around a blind man named Robert visiting an old friend and her husband, who does not care for the Robert. A Rose for Emily is about Emily, a woman who is perceived as a local oddity but soon the townspeople realize she is not just odd, but also a little bit crazy. Both Emily from the short story, A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner, and Robert from Cathedral by Raymond Carver, portray characters that become of the targets of premature assumptions, but when the

Both Emily and Robert are prematurely judged by the narrators in both stories, and the assumptions are so far fetched from the reality. Miss. Emily is perceived to be a lonely old woman, whom nobody ever spoke with. Since they never talk with her or learn anything about what is going on in her life, the townspeople begin to gossip to make up for this. They knew her father had driven away any man from becoming close to her, and they just thought to themselves, “ poor Emily” (32). The townspeople never consider her to be a crazy woman, not even when she claimed her father wasn't dead, and kept the body in her house. They all make up excuses for Emily because they felt sympathy for her, and they kept on just saying poor Emily. The narrator in The Cathedral did not want anything to do with Robert because he was a blind man. He thought they would not have anything to bond over anything, and all he knew about him was what his wife told him. The narrator assumes he has a long cane, dark sunglasses, and is a quiet man whom he would

Emily, their opinions on each person drastically change. Robert and the narrator learn that they have somethings in common, such as both liking to drink scotch. The narrator finally begins to open his eyes and see Robert as a human being, and this is sparked when they all eat dinner together. While they were all eating dinner , the narrator said, “I watched with admiration as he used his fork and knife on the meat” (98). The narrator expects for Robert to be a sloppy eater, constantly using his fingers to eat because of his blindness, but he is dumbstruck that Robert eats like a normal person. He realizes how smart Robert is, and he keeps being shocked as the night goes on. While listening to a show about Cathedrals, Robert asks the narrator to describe him a Cathedral. The narrator tries his hardest, but can not do it. To combat this, Robert takes the narrator's hand and has him close his eyes and together they draw the church just from memory. After drawing the Cathedrals, the narrator describes the picture as, “ It’s really something” (103).He learns how seeing is not everything in life, and how wrong he was with his assumptions about Robert. The narrator finally understands how Robert can love a woman or even just eat dinner being blind, since looking is not as important as he once thought. The townspeople were also just as wrong about Miss. Emily. When Emily dies, the townspeople are let into