In life, it is often found that wisdom is...Such is certainly the case in Raymond Carver's short story, “Cathedral.” In it, he depicts the tale of an unnamed couple who house Robert for a night. Robert's wife, Beulah, was his reader before she tragically passed away due to cancer. The story ends with the blind man ironically asking the narrator to draw a cathedral they were learning about on television, after he failed to describe it in words. Through means of irony and character development, Carver implies in his story that despite Robert's physical ineptness, he can still stand taller in terms of wisdom and social awareness.
Enough can not be said about the oxymoron Carver closes his story with. The narrator fails to verbally describe a cathedral to the blind man, claiming that “cathedrals don't mean anything special to [him]. Nothing.” Upon hearing this, Robert suggests an unconventional approach of drawing the cathedral on paper. This action both helps the blind man trace the drawing and understand it, as well as showing to the narrator that there's more beauty to the cathedral than he had thought himself. This shows that Robert possesses a degree of wisdom that is quite elevated.
The character development and traits used to describe the narrator, as opposed to Robert, shed an invaluable amount of light on the points Carver is attempting to display. The narrator is portrayed with a sense of ignorance, which is illustrated when his wife is describing to him Robert's wife. “She’d told me a little about the blind man’s wife. Her name was Beulah. Beulah! That’s a name for a colored woman. 'Was his wife a Negro?' I asked. 'Are you crazy?' my wife said. 'Have you just flipped or something?' She picked up a potato. I saw it hit the floor, then roll under the stove. 'What’s wrong with you?' she said. 'Are you drunk?'” In this exchange, the narrator effectively misses the purpose behind his wife's description of Beulah,...