In the story “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver, a man realized that being able to see doesn’t mean that you are necessarily better. The protagonist’s wife, who worked for and made friends with a blind man, offers for him to stay with her and her husband after his wife dies. After talking and eating with each other for several hours, the narrator gradually becomes more understanding of the blind man. The narrator starts out as being stereotypical, and by the end, understands more or less how the blind man sees. The story deals with the themes such as not judging a book by its cover, and the transformation of the main protagonist. One of the main themes in this short story is, as cliché as it is, is to not judge a book by its cover. When first …show more content…
For instance, he fails to fully understand the relationship between his wife and Robert. When he and his wife are talking about Robert’s late wife, he feels sorry for her, not because she had cancer, but because she had a husband that couldn’t see her. Even after the narrator’s wife tells him how they were inseparable, and obviously in love, for eight years, he still thinks that it is less than his marriage, since the blind man was not able to give her compliments on her appearance. Because Robert was not able to look at his wife, the narrator thinks of “what a pitiful life this woman must have led”, he assumes that one of her last thoughts was that “he never knew what she looked like”. The fact is, Robert forms better emotional bonds than the narrator. The narrator fails to know what his wife and Robert talk about on their tapes. He thinks it is “harmless chitchat”, and doesn’t understand their connection, he doesn’t really make an effort to know what they are talking about. It’s ironic because even though the narrator was chastising Robert and Beulah's marriage, him and his own wife are not very talkative during this story. It seems that he only annoys his wife when he speaks. He fails to understand the bond between Robert and his wife, and the significance of the audiotapes. He knows that his wife was so depressed that she tried to commit suicide, but doesn’t seem to notice that it was probably