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Symbolism in Cathedral by Raymond Carver

Even when explaining how Robert lost his wife, he has more concern and pity for the woman he married for having to deal with a blind man than he feels pity toward Robert for losing her. .
             What surprised me most is how firmly the narrator stuck to his beliefs about blind people. Almost every single time the blind man did something that surprised him, he shrugged it off and continued on to the next presumption, where he was often wrong again. An example of this was when he assumed all blind people wore dark glasses, and it even bothered him that Robert did not; he went as far as to say "I wished he had a pair" (Norton36) and described the way his eyes moved around as "Creepy" (Norton36). The narrator goes on to make more assumptions later on such as how blind men didn't smoke because "as speculation had it, they couldn't see the smoke the exhaled" (Norton36). The fact alone that the narrator had believed only things he had heard and read about blind people goes to show that it is he who is "blind"; blinded by his judgments. What really made me notice just how deep the roots of the narrator's judgments toward the blind man went was when I realized he was actually uncomfortable around him. I noticed this first when the narrator's wife goes upstairs for an extended period of time and he says "I wished she'd come back downstairs. I don't want to be left alone with a blind man" (Norton38). Those two sentences were extremely powerful and crucial to understanding just how close-minded the narrator is. It really made me take a step back and realize just how crazy and intense some people are about the judgments they pass. It's one thing to have expectations based on knowledge you've read in a book or heard about a certain type of person, but to have it actually go as far as to make you feel uncomfortable is something I have never understood until this point.


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