A response to Cathedral

Don Sampo
James Hepworth
English 150
April 14, 2009
A response

Cathedral
By Raymond Carver

1. The narrator, the husband, said that the blind never laugh and move slowly. She told him that the blind man touched her face, her nose and even her neck! The narrator’s misconceptions about the blind start to change when they are alone and they smoke a joint.
2. The wife kept asking Robert because she thought that she needed to help him upstairs. I think the wife was tired and didn’t think the blind man and the husband would associate very well together. I think that Robert’s reply to the narrator was interesting to the husband. The blind man wanted to talk to the husband for a change, instead of the wife.
3. Robert asked the husband to describe what he saw on television, the cathedral.
4. I think the effectiveness of the story is heightened by the husband being the narrator. It seems like the reader is almost right there in the story with him.
5. I would describe the epiphany as amazing. The narrator closed his eyes, and he got a sense of what it feels like to be blind.
6. No, I wouldn’t describe the narrator as an antihero. The blind man finally helped the narrator to perceive blind people in a whole new light. At the end of the story he says, “But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything. It’s really something,” he said.
7. The wife is a round character. She tells the husband about some of her past, and there are many different aspects of her life before she met the husband. Robert is a blind man, but he seems to know a lot of people and things from talking to different persons.
8. I started to say something about the old sofa. I’d liked that old sofa. But I didn’t say anything. The narrator didn’t say anything because he was trying not to interrupt the conversation between the wife and Robert. He was being kind even though he still wasn’t convinced about his feelings for blind people. I think he was jealous over Robert. Robert was getting all of the attention, and he was not.