Joel Lopez
Professor Tafarella
English 102
November 17, 2013
The Cathedral: A Brief Analysis
As I rode in the bus waiting to arrive at my destination, I began to think about how humans thought of one another. We usually keep inhumane thoughts to ourselves in order to not hurt other people’s feelings. When I thought about this, suddenly at a stop where there was a man in a wheelchair. At that moment the bus was overcrowded with every seat and room taken up by a person. In this crowd, I was drawn to specific person whose remarks caught my attention. If remembered correctly he said these words, “I’m not giving my seat to that man, I don’t care if he’s crippled I’m not getting up.” The bus driver had to tell this handicapped man that the bus was full and he could not let anyone else in. After that scene we arrived at my destination. As I left the bus, there was one thing in my mind. Why did that person call that handicapped man crippled?
Knowing this, a specific story came into mind, oh yes, the short story Cathedral by the author Carver. I can reflect my person experience on to this short story because of the way humans can make certain assumptions of a person without really know them (In this case a man insulting a handicapped man with the word crippled). After describing the story in a very detailed summary, I will give a complete analysis in which I will describe certain things such as the narrator and other scenarios of the story.
To begin I shall give a brief summary of the story. The setting of the story takes place in a house, probably in the city of Seattle since in paragraph 2, it explains a flashback of a hot summer in Seattle. The narrator’s persona is a husband who is not too fond of a blind man who is a friend of his wife. The main characters are the husband and wife who are expecting a visit from a blind man. In the exposition of the story, the wife talks about a blind man who she has met and is very fond of him. She explains to her spouse that the same blind man is going to visit them in a few hours. As the wife explains who the blind man is, the husband seems to dislike the man by making sarcastic remarks about the blind man. Throughout the story the characters have dinner, they drink a little and by the looks of it they smoked marijuana. Towards the end the blind man tells the husband to close his eyes and asks him what does he see. The husband then states that he knows he is in his house, but that he felt he wasn’t inside of anything. The story ends with the husband saying, “Its really something.” (Carver 44)
First I want to talk about the husband and his feelings towards the blind man. The narrator was a very sarcastic man and he seems to dislike blind men, almost racist like. The narrator or better known as the husband, tends to misperceive the “landscape” meaning that he is analyzing this blind man by how other people and things such as media perceive blind men. For instance this following line explains how he sees blind men:
My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved very slowly and never laughed. Sometimes they were led by seeing-eye dogs. (Carver 32)
Now, he hasn’t even seen the blind man and yet he is making assumptions based on the fact of a movie he has watched. The husband was very critical towards this blind man and like I said made many baseless assumptions. For example, when the wife told about the blind man’s wife name (the wife of the blind mind is deceased which is why the blind is visiting because the wife felt sorry for him) which was Beulah, he stated that it was a colored woman’s name in which he asked his wife, “Was his wife negro?” (Carver 34). The assumption made realize that racism was still big back in the 1980’s and that husband really looks down on this blind man. In the exposition of the story, the husband’s existential situation is that he is currently watching TV waiting to see this blind man that his wife is so excited to see even though he seems to dislike the idea of the blind man visiting. Now when the blind man arrives at the house, the husband makes fun of the blind man’s beard. Why did he make fun of the blind man’s beard? Is it because that he is blind he cannot shave his beard without first looking at himself in the mirror? Anyways the husband begins to think on which side of the train the blind man sat on as he came to their house since when coming from New York you sit on the left hand of the train. When the wife asks how the blind man’s ride was, the husband asks which side of the train he came on. Now the tone of the question was obviously sarcastic since the blind man cannot see what part of train he sat on. As the story reached is climax, the husband begins to see the blind man in a new sort of way. They begin to seem to get along in which the resolution the husband sees that been blind is not all that is cut out to be.
Now, that we I talked about how the husband felt towards the blind man, lets talk about the theme of the story. The theme of the story to me is that we should not judge people based on bias information, that not all people are the same. Meaning that this blind man is not the same as another blind man on TV or in any other place. The husband judged this poor blind man even though he has not arrived to his house because his Weltanshauung(worldview) causes him to dislike the blind men, but after having a long conversation they begin to sort of like bond towards the end. Eventually he comes to a point of self-realization or anagnorisis (Aristotle) when the blind man tells him to close his eyes. When he closed his eyes, he knew how the blind man felt to the point in which he became the blind man himself which goes to show that in order to understand a person you must walk in their shoes.
Since we talked about the theme of the story, lets talk about the irony in the story which there is a lot considering how the husband treated this blind badly in the beginning of the story. There are two types of irony used in the story which are situational and verbal (Preminger). First lets talk about some verbal irony in the story. As I mentioned before the husband’s asks a question concerning where the blind man sat in. The husband thinks to himself that people who come from New York ride on the left side. The blind man said he rode on the right side which is ironic considering that the blind man knew where he was sitting even though to the husband he thought that because he was blind he would of sat on the wrong yet in this scenario he sat on the wrong side because he did not know the left side was for people coming from New York. Another verbal irony is when the husband asks if the blind man’s wife was black because her name was Beulah (Carver 36). The irony is that the blind man cannot see how the wife looks like and that he could not tell the wife of the narrator how she looked and so the narrator is making fun of the blind man for him not knowing how his wife looked like. Now, for some situational irony. There was an situational irony where the blind man asks the husband to describe the Cathedral’s and that he felt he was threatened by the blind man. The irony is that knows the husband knows that the blind man has an unfair advantage because he is blind yet why does he feel “threatened”. The whole story is technically a situational irony since the husband had this thought about how blind men were and that this blind man that came to his house was not how he predicted at all.
Irony was one of the contributors of the story, but what also caught my eye was how the story was narrated. About a huge chunk of the story was narrated by the husband’s thoughts with some dialogue and past memories. What interest me is how the use of the husband’s thoughts shows the personality of the husband which is a sarcastic man. Its funny how the husband is going through this whole visit of the blind man thinking about what to say or how to react to the current situation he is in otherwise know as substantial situation. His thoughts revolve around this blind man, how he looks and his life. Thoughts that are rather ironic or just plain mean. When he thought of how sad it was that the blind man’s wife died because the wife knows that the blind man would never know how she looked, the husband showed some empathy, but then afterwards he says “Pathetic” which shows how mean he is towards the blind man and his disgust towards him. His thoughts actually not only showed disgust toward the blind man, but how it showed how the husband maybe sort of jealous of the blind man. How did he show jealousy? Well in page 33 , 6th paragraph, he remembers how the blind man touched the face of his wife. Now, how would you think the husband felt when the blind man felt the face of his wife? Well, obviously furious which me realize why the husband could detests the blind man other than the reason he is blind. When I think about, it feels like the husband is living outside of the real world, I mean he is there with this blind men, but he is so deep in thought like he is in the absurd. I mean we are in his mind, he is narrating the story with his thoughts, but how do we know he is actually there or better yet how do we he is even conscious of what he is doing or saying? As for the dialogue which was a small part of the short story, the thing that made realize that this man, this husband has shown some sort of epiphany was when closed his eyes and said “its really something”. While his eyes were closed he thought of how he depicted the blind man felt, that he was there, but in fact it felt like he was inside of nothing. My guess is that the blind man knew how the husband felt towards him which is why he told him to close his eyes and see how he “saw” the world with his own eyes.
Now, that I analyzed how the story was narrated and I shall I talk about who was Apollonian and who was Dionysian. The concept is that those who are Apollonian they are more toward logical and reasonable thinkers while those who are Dionysian they are more of those who go by emotions and instincts themselves. In this case, the husband was more towards Dionysian and the blind man was more towards Apollonian. First, lets take a look on why the husband was Dionysian. Well for starters his emotions played a large part of the story because he felt hate or dislike towards the blind man. He didn’t like the idea of him coming, his wife did, but he couldn’t wrap the idea of him coming. He was irrational sort of like drunk since Dionysus was the goddess of wine because this blind man was good person, I mean his wife told him how her husband was and so the blind man was very eager to meet the husband. The husband let his emotions control him to far so he could not see the reason of why he should like this blind man, but somehow he tends to like the blind man as the story starts to get to the end. Eventually he liked this blind man, he understood how he felt being blind which is the husband was Dionysus because he lost in his own conflicting emotions. As for the blind man, he seemed more like Apollo for one reason. The reason is when he told the husband to close his eyes. This blind man seemed to have reasonable thinking, he knew that if the husband closed his eyes he would have some sort of anagorisis (epiphany) which in fact the husband have. Not only that, but I guess since the man was blind he “saw” the world in a different way in a more reasonable way in a more logical way. These two since they where completely different from one another they did have some conflict, but in the end they enjoyed each others company.
In conclusion, the story was indeed very enjoyable, the fact that how the husband went through this metamorphosis to a man who disliked blind men to a man who got along with one was truly inspiring. The wife was also a contributor to the story since without her we don’t know who the blind man was. Everyone should this read this story because of the way is told and because of its strong theme which is you can’t judge a book by its cover. That is just because a person is blind or disabled in anyway or better yet just because a person is different doesn’t give you the right to make fun of them or judge them. I talked about the story in great detail from explaining how the narrator was, to what context the story had and like I said before the theme of this short story. In that bus, that rode would it have been different if the bus was half empty? If it was, would that man have gotten up in order give his seat in order to make room for the man who was handicapped? There is only one question that still roams my mind which is this:
Can we all just learn to get along?
Works Cited
Adrian Del Caro, “Dionysian Classicism, or Nietzsche’s Appropriation of an Aesthetic Norm”, in Journal of the History Ideas, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Oct. – Dec, 1989), pp. 589-605 (English)
Carver, Raymond. “Cathedral.” The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed.
Charles David, “Aristotle.” The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Ed.
Preminger, A. & Brogan, The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, MJF Books, 1993, pp. 633-535
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