Cathedral by Raymond Carver

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Name: Arisleydi Perez Professor: Anne Lovering Rounds Class: English 111 Date: September 12, 2012 Forming Bonds The higher walls that a society can build are the preconceived ideas against one group of people or individuals. In the story by Raymond Carver, “Cathedral,” the narrator, who is also part of the story, expresses his feelings toward a blind man he met for the first time in his life. He (the narrator) explains how he struggled to dialogue with the blind man. The ideas he had about how a blind person should be, in addition to the strong relationship his wife had developed with this strange man he didn’t know, made it even more difficult for him to overcome the barriers he formed against the blind man. I will expose some of the evidence in the story that shows the narrator’s incapacity to interact. At the beginning of the story the narrator presented evidence about how unusual he found the friendship of his wife with a blind man. He seemed to be clearly upset with the way that that relationship had been developed. He mentioned: When we first started going out together, she showed me the poem. In the poem, she recalled his fingers and the way they had removed around over face. In the poem, she talked about what she had felt at the time, about what she went through her mind when the blind man touched her nose and lips. I can remember I didn’t think much of the poem. Of course, I didn’t tell her that. (78) The manner in which the narrator described each detail about the poem implies his discontent with the idea of his wife’s proximity to another man. He also brought up the strange back and forth of audio tapes between his wife, who at the time was married to another man, and the blind man in a way to kept in touch and to receive advice from each other. He said: This went on for years. (79) Once she offered him to hear the latest
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