As I continue to read the pieces of literature assigned to us at the end of each class, I do my best to applied previously learned knowledge to expand my understanding of literary analysis. So when I was reading "Cathedral", I was very excited. Mostly because I understood the importance of the first person perspective which told me the real beliefs and feelings (or the lack there of) that made the end of the story very powerful.
The story is told from the perspective of a middle class man, and revolves around the visit of a blind man to his house. He is clearly uncomfortable around this blind man that he never met before that somehow became a big part of his wife's life. While he is there, the narrator tries to look as comfortable as possible by offering the man drinks and drugs. The narrator is using his normal comforts to ease his own insecurities as he is thinking how difficult or inconveniencing it would be to be blind.
When they are 'watching' the television together, the narrator tries to 'narrate' on what the pictures look like to the blind man. When he tries to describe a cathedral to him, it becomes impossible for him to describe as it is so big and beyond himself. So the blind man asks him to help him draw it. While they are drawing, the narrator can not contain himself and continues to draw. Then when the blind man asks him to close his own eyes, he finally saw the beauty of it and felt like he wasn't 'inside' anything.
Though out the story, the narrator felt sorry and discomfort around the blind man as he couldn't even know what it would be like to be blind himself. But it took a blind person to show him that there was more to life than by what you could see, as if he showed him a sort of enlightenment. To which he thought it was 'really something'.
This story was published in 1981, so it was probably 'far out' too.
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i feel like i am always agreeing with what everyone says in their blogs because it is easier to do so, but the truth is, itruley do agree with what we are all saying on here. Gregg, you seem to understand this short story very well. and, of course, i agree with you. i personally, believe that the blind man is a symbol for the epidimay that there is more to life than what can be seen with the naked eye. i feel as though the purpose of blind people in the world is to show everyone elsethis and to teach each of us, in a sense, how to look at the deeper meaning of life. i feel as though the blind are all "wizards" (as mr. b callled robert) placed in our lives to teach us how to look at life in a deeper and more meaningful way.
ReplyDeleteI'm not gonna lie, I was really kind of angered in the beginning of this story when this man didn't understand or even want to meet robert sinmply beacuse he was blind. I don't really understand why people try to make handicapped people more than they really are, people. When i read this story i got the impresssion that this man was afraid of Robert merely because he was blind. I don't know that just makes me mad, and by the way i totally agree with the blind man as an epiphany statement, when he got to the part about drawing with closed eyes, A) totally true, blind people do that, its weird and I've done it before. B) the whole symbolism in that scene kind of smacked me in the face, it was just screaming EPIPHANY SYMBOL! When i got to the end of the story, I was very proud of this man, he had realized that there was more to life than vision, and had come to see that this blind man was not a blind man, but just a man.
ReplyDeleteZach, I felt the exact same way that you did toward the husband at the begining of this short story. I felt like he was so incredibly uncapable of feeling anything just about this man that he had never met. He was blind, yeah, but so what. It was like he was a different breed of human; and it's like you said, that just bothered me. I wanted to shake this guy by the neck and make him understand that there is more to life than just him and that Robert was no less of a person simply because he is handicaped.
ReplyDeleteThat point aside, I was happy, proud almost, of the ending. This main guy did a complete 180 and seemed to finally understand that there is more in this world than there appears to be, more than he could origionaly see.
I still can't get over how the wife so casually accepted the husband and Robert smoking dope... still makes me chuckle a little... =P
ReplyDeleteAll the same, this story (especially the beginning) is a really good example of how hurtful racism, sexism, (blind-ism =P), etc... can be to individuals and a society.
Hahaa Luke I'm so with you. I thought it was crazy how random it was that he just pulled it out and was like, "Hey, wanna smoke with me?" But I really liked Catherdral! When I read about it in references from How to Read Literature like a Professor, I thought it was pretty good just from those small references. But, when I actually read the story, I was just like in awe of how the author completely captured the essence of the main character's realization that Robert was a human, too. Even though it takes drugs to realize this, I really felt like the concept and basically the whole entire point of the story was achieved so perfectly that when I finished reading it, I felt like I had gained some experience in being less judgemental.
ReplyDeleteI always feel like I'm going out on a limb with the random things I say, but did anyone ever think that the Dubliner's story The Dead contains a very similar idea? In both situations the men discover that their wives have loved someone they have never met before. It appears to throw both relationships into uncertainty. However, i think the main difference between the two stories development of this situation is that in the Dead the husband never meets his wife's first love,though he continues to question not only the relationship, but his accomplishments and purpose as a person. In the cathedral, Robert meets the old lover (the blind man) and similar to The Dead gains insight that he is not fulfilling his life because he is not seeing everything that a blind man sees.
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