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

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

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

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