Raymond Carver Cathedral Essay

Can a person be gifted with perfect sight and yet still be blind? Raymond Carver attempts to answer this question in his short story “Cathedral” when he suggests two types of blindness: physical blindness which leaves one without visual perception and a narrow-minded blindness which causes one to fail to see the true side of people due to his or her stereotypical views and fixed opinions. In fact, in this story, a physically blind man happens to see more of the world, in a cognitive way, than a perfectly healthy, yet judgmental and opinionated man. Through his use of point of view and diction, Carver emphasizes that man’s jealousy can blind his or her view of the world. By using a first person point of view, Carver is able to create a sense of jealousy through …show more content…
I can remember I didn’t think much of the poem. Maybe I just don’t understand poetry” (Carver 33). Clearly, it seems that Carver uses a first person point of view so that readers can see a glimpse of the narrator’s jealousy as he expresses his feelings of displeasure in the poem not being written about him. Furthermore, the husband’s lack of interest in his wife’s poem suggests that his jealousy is causing him to overlook or completely miss any beauty in his wife’s writing. He even tries to brush off his envious feelings concluding that he “just [doesn’t] understand poetry” (Carver 33). Similarly, in the first person narrative, the husband expresses his feelings of jealousy by confessing that “[the wife and blind man] talked of things that had happened to them…I waited in vain to hear my name on my wife’s sweet lips…But I heard nothing of the sort” (Carver 37). Once more, through the narrators own personal feelings, readers get a sense of jealousy as he “waited in vain” to have his wife talk about him