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"Blind and likewise: a Story of Sight and Touch"

"Blind and likewise: a story of sight and touch"


In Raymond Carver's short story "The cathedral", the reader is treated to an interesting paradox, since the narrative is centred on the most unseeing - although complimentary - pair of characters: a blind man who can see trough appearances, and a seeing man who can hardly look beyond circumstance. The core message the author aims to express is arguably concerned with different types of blindness; the obvious blindness which concerns the senses, and the rather subtle blindness which frequently afflicts the human heart.

The story's narrator is ostentatiously portrayed throughout as the common archetype of someone who keeps looking, yet keeps failing to see the reality around him. Right from the start, he claims three reasons for not liking Robert, none of which make really any sense; all of which contribute to his depiction as an alienated, shallow human being, owner to a severely blunt personality. He begins by telling he doesn't like strangers; then he states he doesn't like blind people. Finally, he actually admits it's not blind people he does not like, but rather the idea that he has of blind people, as depicted in the movies.
However, Robert's presence in the household proves positively influential, and it doesn’t take long until the narrator questions the degree of his own self-imposed human alienation. The narrator is someone who has fallen prey to a mind-numbing routine, apparently neglecting all human relationships, including his own wife. Ultimately, he must have felt so alone he barely realized it, and only trough Robert's unexpected warm companionship, he managed to understand his sad, lonely detachment: "Every night I smoked dope and stayed up as long as I could before I fell asleep. My wife and I hardly ever went to bed at the same time."

In his turn, Robert the blind man, he's portrayed as the triumph of content over form; or essence over appearance. In a way, he's also the archetypical blind man who has learned to surpass his senses and thus surpass himself. In the story, he acts as the most unexpected master, once the narrator finds himself reflected upon the old man. As the story develops, the narrator becomes progressively aware of his self-established demise, and only when Robert assists him in drawing the cathedral, does he learn to truly see what's in front of him; whereas up to that point he had been merely looking: "The truth is, cathedrals don't mean anything special to me. Nothing. Cathedrals. They're something to look at on late-night TV. That's all they are." By merely looking, the narrator failed to see the essence of things around him, especially the people, whom he apparently took for granted.

Trough the course of dinner, the narrator assisted his wife's conversation with Robert by providing nothing except idle remarks, as a testament of his own futility; yet all the while, it remained obvious how he silently craved for a display of his wife's affection or approval. The narrator must have felt very unfortunate, lonely, and withdrawn from the real world. Consequently, he despised anything new, since miserable people tend to become addicted to their sorrow. He might as well have admitted that he did not like any people at all, that he'd rather just be left alone with the TV screen. He might as well admit how severed he felt from the real world, lonely and aching on the inside; it would very much read the same, to the perceptive mind. A mind such as Robert's: one that learns to truly see things as they are.

Robert knew a thing or two about people, and it was not by chance that he broke trough the field of apathy that kept his host a prisoner. Trough his touch, the blind seer reached where his sight could make no glimpse, and by reaching out to the narrator's heart, he made his aware that he had been shutting out people from his personal sphere, including his own wife.
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Posted by: Kate L. Rizal

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