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Compare And Contrast Cathedral And A Good Man Is Hard To Find

1375 Words6 Pages

In both short stories, “Cathedral” written by Raymond Carver and “A Good Man is Hard to Find” written by Flannery O’Connor, we encounter characters that have a limited perspective on life. We find that the unnamed narrator in “Cathedral” has a bias mindset towards the blind man, Robert before he even meets and gets to know him. While in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the grandmother is ignorant of her surroundings while being oblivious to her own flaws. Both stories demonstrate the overcoming of blindness through prejudice and vanity to end up seeing something greater than themselves through the use of characterization, symbolism, and epiphanies. In “Cathedral,” the narrator’s wife invites her blind friend, Robert, to stay in their home …show more content…

With the grandmother being early to the car, she was able to hide “a basket with Pitty Sing, the cat, in it”(354). This proves that the grandmother makes decisions without consulting the family. She believes that her decisions are superior and are to execute. The clothes she decided to wear includes “a navy blue straw sailor hat with a white violets on the brim [...] In case of an accident, anyone seeing her would know at once that she was a lady” (353 -354). The navy blue hat symbolizes that she cares more about her vanity after death than actually being a moral human being during her time she spent alive and well. During the car ride, the grandmother tells her grandchildren the story of the time Mr. Edgar Atkins Teagarden had courted her. “He was a very good-looking man and a gentleman and that he brought her a watermelon every Saturday afternoon with his initials in it. E.A.T.” (355). With the gentleman courting her, she proves that she only appeals to materialistic items while trying to enforce her point of view onto her grandchildren. Her granddaughter was not impressed with the idea that her grandmother would like her to marry someone based on their looks or …show more content…

The unnamed narrator does not see Robert, the blind man, as a person, but as someone different. The grandmother, on the other hand, believes in her appearance and belief that is better than other people. After the challenges they both face, they end up finding enlightenment. In “Cathedral,” the narrator was not certain on how to describe the Cathedral to Robert. The narrator resorts to drawing and with a pen in his hand, he had realized that Robert “closed his hand over my hand” and asks the narrator to “close your eyes” as they drew the Cathedral (75-76). The narrator placed himself in Robert’s shoes and realized how inaccurate his perception about Robert was. By sketching a Cathedral, they were drawing a piece of art that represents a collaboration closer to sight. By sharing an intimate experience, Robert the physically blind man was able to help the unnamed narrator, metaphorically blinded prejudice man see his errors in his conscious and see things

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712 Words | 3 Pages

In the opening sentence of “Cathedral”, the narrator identifies Robert as “this blind man” as opposed to the various other labels he could heap upon him (Carver 514). The narrator also propagates the idea that “the blind move slowly and never laugh”, an illogical stereotype. This is not dissimilar to Jesus’s discriminatory treatment at the hands of the Romans as he conceptualized Christianity and spread his message to the people. Robert and the narrator have a Christian communion experience of sorts that

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801 Words | 4 Pages

Robert didn’t know what he was talking about so they drew one together. When the wife took a glance and wondered what was going The Blind man said, “We’re drawing a cathedral. Me and him are working on it. Press hard,” he said to me.” As we see the two are now getting along.

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1268 Words | 6 Pages

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.

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978 Words | 4 Pages

The narrator he is a portrait of a middle class man living paycheck to paycheck who must face the darkness in his life unlike the blind man .The Two characters both feel some sort of loneliness throughout the story, that’s why the narrator's wife invited the blind man over for dinner .The narrator isn't self aware enough to admit his longing for himself or being alone, but Robert tells him to realize that he is lacking for company. Both men start to warm up to each other and talk about their problems after

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448 Words | 2 Pages

In Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” written in 1983, the author points out that empathy and perspective are the only way to truly experience profound emotion. The narrator is struggling is sucked into his own comfort zone, he drowns his dissatisfaction on life, marriage, and job in alcohol. A man of limited awareness breaks through his limitations by socializing with a blind man. Despite Roberts physical limitations, he is the one who saved narrator from himself and helped him to find the ones vies of the world.

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431 Words | 2 Pages

From that moment, the narrator show his true side to me. It shows that he doesn’t not care about his wife feeling toward the blind man. After carefully reading “cathedral”, the narrator is jealous of the blind man relationship with his

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1288 Words | 6 Pages

What if someone unexpected changed your way of thinking, permanently? What if God chose to send someone into your life to abolish you superficial thoughts? In both the stories “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, by Flannery O’Connor, and “Cathedral”, by Raymond Carver, the authors create main characters who lack faith and think superficially about life. However, in both stories, the authors send unexpected characters to act like mediums, for their job is to be the connection of the main character’s initial position in faith and their final position, revealed at the end of both stories. Even though the stories have a different plot and involve diverse kinds of characters, the final message and moral is the same.

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838 Words | 4 Pages

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.’

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711 Words | 3 Pages

The main character speaks of the blind in a repugnant way. He says things such as “his being blind bothered me” and “a blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to” all within the first paragraph of the story. The author had included in the story that the husband had never met a blind person, so one could deduce that his negativity towards the blind was unfounded and ignorant. His wife, however, did not feel this way towards the blind man, Robert.

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1522 Words | 7 Pages

Throughout the story the reader can affirm that the wife has a deep, strong relationship with the blind man. The wife and the blind man share an intimate and vulnerable moments together; one includes when she lets him touch her face so he can remember her. Similarly, the narrator gets to share an intimate moment with Robert that leads to an epiphany. The epiphany that the narrator experiences when drawing a cathedral refers to seeing life from Robert, the blind man’s, point of view and seeing the struggles as well as life experiences a blind man must encounter on a daily basis.

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1358 Words | 6 Pages

Robert asks about the narrator’s religion which brings them to the topic of Cathedrals. Since Robert is blind he doesn’t know exactly what a Cathedral is and only can picture a normal building and what he thinks it might be like. As they continue to talk, Robert asks for some paper and a pen. Robert takes Bub’s hand and tells him to draw a Cathedral. Robert continues to cheer Bub on and continue drawing.

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860 Words | 4 Pages

In the works of Literature an epiphany is “a moment of profound insight or revelation by which a character’s life is greatly altered” (24). In the short story “Cathedral” Raymond Carver uses epiphany to draw on the theme, blinded views can alter someone’s behavior. On the realistic level, epiphany advances the plot and character development because they are the basis for the story’s central action. They also help define the narrator and play a vital part in revealing the story’s theme. The following changes in the character’s views have shown an evident development.

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1063 Words | 5 Pages

Robert’s wife has recently died and he used to work for the narrator’s wife. Robert comes to visit the narrator’s home and the narrator is not happy about this because he believes blind people to be miserable and gloomy based solely on what he has absorbed from the movies. At the end of the first paragraph, he says, “A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to” (1.1). Little to the narrator’s knowledge, his wife and Robert had been using audio tape to correspond over ten years, and have much past history with each other. The narrator’s wife makes sure he knows to make Robert comfortable, and if he doesn’t it shows that he does not love her.

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528 Words | 3 Pages

In his contemporary short story, “Cathedral,” Raymond Carver tells the story of an unnamed narrator, his wife, and an old friend, a blind man named Robert. Robert has come to visit the narrator’s wife, who is quite excited to see this man whom she hasn’t seen in ten years, yet the same can’t be said of the narrator who is noticeably and vocally uncomfortable about his visit. The story is told through the narrator’s first person point of view, showcasing his thoughts and the events that take place when Robert comes to visit. Carver highlights the theme of having the ability to see, but not truly seeing, through his use of colloquial language, and creation of relatable characters. “Cathedral” begins with the narrator informing the audience

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1054 Words | 5 Pages

Robert literally can’t see, but he does obtain vision only on a deeper level. The narrator isn’t too enamored with the idea of another man coming to his home. He is insensitive and makes some harsh comments that make Robert feel a little uncomfortable. Due to his callous and unsympathetic personality, the narrator is never able to connect with his wife while Robert is instantly able to. Robert comes to visit the narrator and his wife at their home for the first time.

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