Examples Of Epiphany In Cathedral By Raymond Carver

An epiphany is a moment in life where someone has a sudden realization or an insight about an event. In “A&P” by John Updike and “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver, both protagonists experience an event that lead to their own epiphanies. The epiphanies in both stories are very similar but are also different. In “A&P,” the protagonist, Sammy, is still young—just being nineteen years old—so he has a different view of his epiphany than the husband, the protagonist in “Cathedral”, since he is older and much more experienced in life. Both show that they are miserable with the life that they have but their lives will impacted by people who unexpectedly enter them. “A&P” and “Cathedral” express how much Sammy and the husband hate their jobs. Throughout

The husband—whose name is never revealed in the story—is described to have a drinking problem and smokes marijuana every night. All the husband does throughout the story is drink either scotch or whiskey with little water added to it. His mood always seems to put a downer to everything since he is always so negative and his wife even tells him, “’You don’t have any friends,’” (Carver 109). All these hints and indications just show how miserable this man is with his life. Everything about him is negative, even his attitude towards the blind man. It is heavily shown that the husband is jealous of the blind man and his relationship with his wife because their friendship is shown to be better than their marriage. He especially started feeling a pang of jealousy towards the blind man because he started comparing job the blind man use to have with his current job. “The blind man was also a ham radio operator. He talked in his loud voice about conversations he’d had with fellow operators in Guam, in the Philippines, in Alaska, and even in Tahiti. He said he’d have a lot of friends there if he ever wanted to go visit those places,” (Carver 110). When the blind man, Robert starts talking about his old job, the husband starts seeing how interesting and engaging Robert’s job was. Robert even mentions how many friends he has to the wife which hints how envy the husband must be of him. While Robert is

In “A&P,” Sammy’s life had already changed as soon as three girls in bikinis walked into the A&P store and he did not even realize it himself. These tree girls that walked into the store would not bother anyone in modern day society but during the time period that this story took place, they symbolized a new change. As discussed in class, the A&P symbolizes the old era, especially Lengel the manager, and the three girls wearing the bikinis symbolized the new era to come. Through the young point of view by Sammy, he is describing every inch and curve of these girls in their bikinis. He talks about their beauty but he is mostly engaged on the main girl, Queenie. “The sheep pushing their carts down the aisle—the girls were walking against the usual traffic (not that we have one-way signs or anything)—were pretty hilarious. You could see them, when Queenie’s white shoulders dawned on them, kind of jerk, or hop, or hiccup, but their eyes snapped back to their own baskets and on they pushed…But there was no doubt, this jiggled them. A few houseslaves in pin curlers even looked around after pushing their carts past to make sure what they had seen was correct,” (Updike 19). Sammy finds it amusing that women shopping in the store created a “traffic” way with their carts--since it appears that everything runs the same in the store—and the girls were ruining their circulation. The same thing applies for those