Blindness

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…

Turning a Blind Eye: How Blindness Connects with The Odyssey and O’ Brother Where Art Thou? While reading The Odyssey for class, something that really struck me was how many characters were blind in this epic. At first, I didn’t really get the hint, but after seeing this reoccurring theme more than a few times, I began to really take notice of how often blindness would show up. We meet Demodocus, Polyphemus, Tiresias, and Odysseus’s dog- Argos throughout the epic: All have some sort of visual…

loss and balance problems at birth. Vision problems usually develop before age 10, and vision loss quickly progress to total blindness. Type 2. Children with this type have moderate to severe hearing loss at birth. They do not have balance problems. Vision problems usually develop during the teenage years. The problems develop slowly and do not result in total blindness. Type 3. Children with this type have gradual hearing loss that starts later in childhood. They may also have some…

Critical Thinking: Case Manager Interview According to the World Bank (2014), the United States spent 17.9% of its gross domestic product on healthcare in 2012. In dollars, this represents approximately $3.8 trillion spent in this country on healthcare. This astronomical figure might be acceptable if the country enjoyed the best health outcomes in the world; however, according to the World Health Organization the United States health system ranks 37th of the surveyed countries worldwide…

low vision and thirty-nine million are blind (WHO). The causes of blindness fall into two categories: natural causes and environmental causes. Some natural causes of blindness are cataracts, (Landau 20), glaucoma (16), and macular degeneration (22). Environmental causes of blindness can occur from exposure to chemicals (30) and sharp objects puncturing the eye (29). Stargardt’s disease is categorized as a natural cause of blindness. It affects approximately one in ten thousand people in the…

Looking But Not Seeing. Appreciably, blindness is a dominant theme woven through the garment of the “Cathedral” story by Raymond Carver. One is taken aback by the utter rawness and cold attitude exhibited by the narrator about the blind man. The narrator loudly wonders on who could dare attend a little wedding between Robert, the blind man and his sweetheart Beulah and further states that he does not have any blind person as a friend. As the story develops, one thing becomes certain that the…

In Pakistan over half of the incidences of blindness were caused by cataracts; over three quarters of these cases being treatable (Shab et al., 2008). With the work LRBT has done over the past thirty years, they have created a supportive environment for the residents of Pakistan. Helping reduce the prevalence of blindness in Pakistan by almost fifty percent (LRBT, 2016). Many of their projects have a heavier focus on rural communities…

shadows, the illusions we experience, of mere trifles. The freed prisoner’s pain and blindness in trying to see the artifacts and fire is a representation of the denial of the material world. The images themselves that the prisoner sees eventually represent the realm of forms. When the prisoner goes back to the cave, he, as a philosopher, is simply fulfilling his duty, sharing what he knows. The blindness when he goes back to the cave symbolises his difficulty to accept ignorance after…

Onchocerciasis, or river blindness, is a neglected tropical disease (NTD) that can cause visual impairment and debilitating and disfiguring skin disease. It is the world’s second leading cause of blindness due to infection and the world’s fourth leading cause of preventable blindness. It is a parasitic disease, caused by a filarial worm, and is transmitted by repeated bites from infected blackflies. It is called river blindness because the infected blackflies breed in rapidly flowing streams;…

Ignorance is the worst form of blindness. In the short story, “Cathedral,” Raymond Carver creates a dynamic character who is judgmental and lacks insight, but ironically, a blind man soon helps him see. This character, never actually given a name, is also the narrator. Carver’s decision to withhold his name is intriguing since he gives the blind man a name, Robert. The narrator in “Cathedral” himself produces an antisocial, prejudiced personality for others to interact with, but shows the…