The Blind Leading the Blind

Most would have to say that “Cathedral” is pretty literal, fairly exemplary of Carver’s minimalist tendencies. There isn’t a ton of symbolism in the text—at least, not the way I read it and it’s certainly no “Revelation”—and the reader doesn’t necessarily have to dissect the dialogue to discover the jealousy of the husband, who never receives a name. But Carver uses symbolism very effectively when he does employ it. His symbolism in “Cathedral” is poignant, though scarce, and emphasizes the undertones of the short story. Robert impresses me the most when it comes to Carver’s symbolism skill. Robert embodies the husband’s insecurities and leads him from blindness to sight throughout their encounter.

Right off the bat, the husband expresses his distaste for Robert’s visit. In the first paragraph, the husband frankly says that he “wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit” and specifically points out that Robert was “no one [he] knew.” The husband’s jealousy is not yet apparent, but one starts to sense it in his disgusted fascination with Robert’s touching the husband’s wife and even with their tape correspondence. If anything, the husband is defensive. He latches onto the fact that Robert is blind, claiming a prejudice against them.

I get the sense that he is just looking for a flaw in Robert and doesn’t have an actual problem with blind people. This sense is strengthened when the husband starts to talk about his wife’s childhood sweetheart. Immediately, the husband starts to bash him, to lower the sweetheart to below his level. The narrator starts into a slightly disjointed story with vague details, apparently intending to give the impression that it all wasn’t a big deal to him. Yet, he takes shots at “the officer-to-be,” “the man who’d first enjoyed her favors” (4). Once when speaking about the officer, the husband says, “Her officer—why should he have a name? he was the childhood sweetheart, and what more does he want?” (5). That’s pretty defensive. Then, the husband refocuses on Robert. He first goes after Robert’s wife: “Beulah! That’s a name for a colored woman.” Apparently, he’s a racist now too. Next he attacks the little wedding Robert and Beulah had, asking “who’d want to go to such a wedding in the first place?” (15). Next comes a slew of criticisms from the husband extending from what Robert was left with after Beulah dies—Pathetic!—to Robert’s beard that was altogether too much. It’s clear by the time the husband, wife, and Robert sit down to dinner that the husband is far less than pleased with Robert’s presence.

The criticisms the husband makes of Robert illuminates the husbands greatest insecurity: his relationship with his wife. The attacks on Robert are the products of this insecurity. The husband’s insecurity is not directly spoken about in his narration. This insecurity is discerned only through little lines in the story combined with the attacks on Robert. When the trio sits down on the couch in the living room, the husband says something rather revealing: “My wife finally took her eyes off the blind man and looked at me. I had the feeling she didn’t like what she saw” (102). After dinner, we again see a hint that the husband isn’t completely confident with his relationship with his wife. As the wife and Robert are chatting away and catching up as old friends do, the husband bemoans how he “waited in vain to hear [his] name on [his] wife’s sweet lips: ‘And then my dear husband came into my life’—something like that” but heard nothing of the sort (45). The husband’s insecurity in his marriage is magnified by Robert (at least to the husband) and this insecurity blinds him to the great, kind man Robert is, minimizing Robert to simply a blind man.

It is when Robert’s interaction with the wife ends that the husband starts to see who Robert really is. The wife falls asleep and the pair is left all alone. What on earth is the husband going to talk to a blind man who married a woman named Beulah about? Cathedrals, of course. A show about cathedrals comes on the television and it turns out Robert has no idea what they look like. Robert asks the husband to describe cathedrals to him. The husband is incapable of doing so sufficiently. Here is where Robert really steps in symbolically. Robert asks the husband to draw a cathedral while Robert holds his hand to feel the motions. Robert is in fact inviting the husband to see past his jealousy, his insecurity. At the end of the story, the husband can now see.
Robert is essential to the gaining of the husband’s sight. Robert is the one who cures the husband’s blindness by sharing his own inability to physically see. The husband no longer sees Robert as a blind man, but as a man who is blind.