The Blind Man

"Cathedral," by Raymond Carver opens with the narrator telling the reader in a conversational tone that a blind friend of his wife's is coming to visit them. The narrator is clearly unhappy about the upcoming visit. He then flashes back to the story of how his wife met the blind man when she worked for him as a reader. It was during this same time that she was getting ready to marry an officer in the Air Force. When a new chapter in her life is ready to unfold, she tells the blind man goodbye and he asks if he can touch her face. When Robert touched her face, it became is a very important moment in her life. The narrator has a hard time understanding this. Although his wife has kept in touch with the blind man for the past ten years before the story takes place sending each other tapes because Robert wouldn’t be able to read a traditional letter. This will be the first time she has seen Robert since her first marriage and remarriage. Robert himself has just lost his wife and thought that traveling to Connecticut to visit with her family will help deal with his hardship.

There is a sense of loneliness among both the narrator and Robert in this story. The husband is clearly jealous of his wife’s reunion with an old friend from her past, and being a man doesn’t help the situation either. "I wasn't enthusiastic about his visit.... A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to." Robert’s wife had just died so he is feeling alone too and tries to find comfort by visiting the wife. The story comes to an end when the two men, the narrator and Robert, sit down to start a drawing of a cathedral. The narrator is interested in what Robert actually “sees” while he is blind. Robert’s intension was to put the husband in his own shoes. He had the husband close his eyes as they began to draw. It was at that time that the husband, in a way, felt peace. “It’s really something,” He said.