"Cathedral"

      Although all of the short stories I have read thus far have been wonderful and compelling, I would have to say that I have a strong predilection towards "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver.  I enjoyed the fact that it was such a short and simply-written story, with such a strong message.   I also enjoyed the genuine characters of the narrator, his wife, and the blind man.

      At the beginning of the story, the narrator seems very narrow-minded about the idea of a blind man staying at his house.  He uses simple language and choppy sentences, and he doesn't even refer to the blind man by his name, he just refers to him as "the blind man."  This gives the reader the impression that he is stubborn and jejune.  However, when the blind man comes to stay at the house, the narrator is cordial, but overall blasé about his stay.

      When his wife falls asleep, the narrator and the blind man start watching television, and eventually come to a late-night show about cathedrals from across the world.  Then an ingenuous question pops into the narrator's head, "Do you have any idea what a cathedral is?  What they look like?"  This is the first moment that the narrator actually becomes curious about the blind man and opens up his mind to learning more about him.  When the blind man basically admits that he does not know what a cathedral looks like, he tells the narrator to draw one.  The narrator admits that he is not an artist, but he was so inspired by the blind man that he continued to draw a cathedral in great detail.  Then, the blind man would reconnoiter the drawing with his fingers and feel what the cathedral looked like.  He then tells the narrator to close his eyes while he drew.  In the end it is tacit that the narrator took away from the experience a lesson of understanding.

      This lesson of understanding is very ironic.  In the beginning, when the narrator was closed-minded about the blind man, he was the one who was actually blinded by ignorance.  The blind man, on the other hand, was very unbiased and he learned to deal with his setback.  It seemed that even though the man was blind, he had a broader view of the world than the narrator.  In the end the blind man is able to teach the narrator about the importance of understanding other people's situations and not to assume the worst about people.