The Transcendental Epiphany In Carver's Cathedral

An epiphany is a sudden and profound realization and comprehension of something deep spurred by a seemingly ordinary experience but with far-reaching and often life-changing consequences. Epiphanies are reliable literature tools for showing shift or a specific personal change in characters, for example, a minor character becoming a protagonist or antagonist. One event in a short story can set off a new chain of events in a completely different direction. The transcendental epiphany in Carver’s “Cathedral” is an inner realization occurring at the end of the short story and the effects of the new perspective are left on to the reader to decide the next path of the story (Carver, 13). In Malamud’s Angel Levine, the epiphany is of the magical realist type as the protagonist Manischevitz is a struggling tailor who has lost too much but cannot accept help from “Angel Levine” a black Jew. He finally relents towards the end of …show more content…
He is a husband to a wife who has a blind house-guest called Robert and after meeting and spending time eating, chatting and watching television the narrator's behavior shows that he is inconsiderate to the blind man. Robert asks what a cathedral looks like and the two begin to draw, the narrator closes his eyes, and suddenly he experiences how it feels to be blind- he becomes so captivated such that his eyes are closed because he has found out that being blind can feel liberating. There is irony in this case because one would think that blindness is more like being locked in a prison but instead the narrator feels free. The initial tone in Cathedral is conflicted, both inner conflict and external conflict. The narrator does not know any blind people and his opinion on them shows how he thinks of himself above them. The transcendental epiphany he gets at the end of the story is symbolic to the fact that it is him who has been blind up to that