Cognitive Blindness In Raymond Carver's Cathedral

Even those of us with sight can be blind; and although it may not be physical, the blindness that is cognitive can be damaging to ourselves and our relationships with those around us. Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral” portrays a perfect example of this. In this story, Raymond Carver uses point of view to help emphasize the narrator’s initial bias for those who are visually impaired and to better convey how his (the narrator’s) negative opinions are altered throughout the story.

“Cathedral” is a short story about a blind man who goes to visit an old friend after the death of his wife. The story is told from the perspective of said friend’s husband, who has significant ‘cognitive blindness.’ Cognitive blindness can be described as

After the narrator makes a joke about his wife’s friend in poor tatse, she turns around and says “If you love me, you can do this for me. If you don’t love me, okay. But if you had a friend, any friend, and the friend came to visit, I'd make him feel comfortable.”(Carver.) to which the narrator tried to rebuttle with “I don’t have any blind friends.”(Carver.) But his wife immdiately shot back with “You don’t have any friends,” and while trying to get the narrator to sympathize with the blind man, she reminds him that his wife just died, but the first thing that the narrator responds with “Was his wife a Negro?” (Carver.) Again presenting another one of his biases and showing his blindness. (“The phenomenon can also be the result of a person being so focused (on) one thing... that they fail to see another perhaps otherwise obvious thing.”

Before the blind man even arrives and is properly introduced to the narrator, he (the narrator) expresses his bigotry and speaks ill of a man he’s never met. Through the numerous rude comments he makes to his wife, he hints at a handful of different biases he holds without shame. The bias presented most often in this story is his ill opinion of those who are visually impaired. Saying things like “..his being blind bothered me”(Carver) or “a blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to”(Carver) as well as expressing his belief in the stereotypes he had heard about blind people. I believe it was the amount of faith that he had in these stereotypes that led him to have these personal