The Narrator In Raymond Carver's Cathedral

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Sharifa Yusuf Ms. Ravita English 1102 April 6, 2015 Raymond Carver was an American short story writer and poet. He was born into a poor family at the tail-end of the Depression. He was the son of a violent alcoholic, and he married when he was 19. He soon became an alcoholic and struggled to provide for his family. Soon, Carver enrolled in a writing program and reinvented the American short story. Carver died of lung cancer at the age of 50. One of Carvers stories, “Cathedral“published in 1983, is about a man who had very pessimistic thoughts of the blind. Robert is a blind man who has been friends with the narrator’s wife for a couple of years. When the narrator finds out that Robert is coming to visit, he is not very pleased. At first, he thinks blind people are miserable…show more content…
These thoughts soon change as he and the blind man Robert become acquainted. Upon Roberts’s arrival, he tends to make the narrator’s wife smile and laugh a lot and the narrator is not too fond of this. The narrator in “Cathedral” transforms from being very judgmental and unhappy to being more open-minded towards life. The narrators judgment of the blind is merely based off of TV shows and movies. We all know that television tends to exaggerate the norm. Although the narrator would join in on some conversations that his wife and Robert had, it was clear he still had a certain image of the blind. The narrator is very jealous that his wife has kept in touch with Robert and although he tries to make it seem like his marriage is stable, it is not. In Marriage: Roles, Stability and Conflict, Kenneth S. Pearlman states, “When responsibilities and roles are added to a

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