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Poem Analysis: Cathedral

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s traveling down from Brenden Theatres, sandwiched in between Bobaloca and The Mediterranean, is a place that I have become familiar with for quite some time. I will see the same brown exterior with black outlined white letters spelling “Steamboat” directly above the black “Hot Pot/Skewers” awning. As you walk in front of the place, you are greeted by window panes that reveal the softly lit interior provided by hanging industrial lights and bright yellow string lights that adorn the two side walls. At 5 P.M sharp, Steamboat opens and customers are greeted by friendly, petite girls wearing black shirts with the word “crew” printed in bold white on their upper left chest and welcoming smiles. For five days a week, you can find me working as a …show more content…

The story is about the narrator meeting his wife’s blind friend. At the beginning the narrator does not want to meet the blind man because of the knowledge he has about blind people is from movies: “the blind moved slowly and never laughed. Sometimes they were led by seeing eye dogs. A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to” (Cathedral). After meeting the blind man, he recognizes the blind man is actually a normal person who knows where exactly which food is at when he is eating, dress well does not use a walking stick and understand what others are talking about. At the end of the night, the TV was on and they were watching the TV talking about different kinds of Cathedral. The narrator can see the cathedral and know how it looks like, but cannot explain it to the blind man. The blind man knows the real definition behind that cathedral by listening to what the tv says. If the narrator actually listens and understand to his wife when she was talking to him what kind of person her friend is he would not have thought about him that way and learn that he was smarter than him. He did not use the information that his wife provided him to put some thinking. The narrator's knowledge about the blind is wrong. The blind man has knowledge of an able person and he uses his knowledge of thinking which also makes him a wise

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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

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The narrator had never meet a blind person before and believed in the stereotypes. The narrator said “A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to” (Carver 331), in the last sentence of the first paragraph. For the narrator, there should be no problem letting a blind man into the house. Throughout this short story the husband continues to make short remarks to the old blind man, as well as keeping a routine for making comments to the blind man. For the reader it is really easy not to pay attention to the story and instantly get annoyed.

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