Characters in Cathedral Essay

The Characteristics of the Characters in Cathedral

Short storys such as Raymond Carvers Cathedral use characters in such ways to reveal the uniqueness in different characteristics. The characters consist of a wife who is a very caring and outgoing person. Her husband on the other hand is blind in a sense that he doesnt see how jealous and insecure he really is. Robert is a blind man, but he can see how to help others with his insight and compassion to listen. These three main characters in the shirt story Cathedral are a display of different personalities.

The narrators wife is an outgoing and friendly person that hates to be distant from her friends. This one summer she worked for a blind man by the name of Robert in which she read case studies, reports (103). Working for the man in itself was a nice thing to do simply because he was blind and there were a number of things that he could not do on his own. Before she was married to the narrator of the story, she was married to a man in the Air Force. She loved her husbandbut she got to feeling lonely and cut off from people she kept losing in that moving-around life (104). She liked to be around people she knew other than her husband. She likes to have friends and although she was separated from Robert due to distance because she had moved from that city they were in she still kept in contact with him through recordings of tapes she would make and send to him to tell him things that were going on within her life and he would send one back telling about things that were going on with him. Another thing about the narrators wife is that she understood Roberts problems. The summer after the narrators wife stopped working for Robert; this woman by the name of Beulah had gone to work for him (105). They later were married until, Beulahs health went into a rapid decline (105), that made the narrators wife have a heart for Robert in a non romantic way. With her hearing and feeling for everything that goes on in Roberts life, makes her even more caring about him and in general than she already is. She even takes up for Robert over her own husband when she feels like he is being immature about Robert visiting.

Now the narrator on the other hand has jealousy in his heart, so much that he doesnt like the fact that his wife is inviting Robert over to stay. From the beginning of the story he always identified Robert as THIS BLIND MAN (103). He constantly talks bad about Robert for a while in the story. When Robert is over to the house the narrator immediately notices how much attention his wife is giving to him and it made him act very dry toward Robert. All was bad with the narrator and Robert in the beginning, but after a while they started talking and got to know each other a little better because after all Robert was like a stranger to the narrator. At one point the narrators wife became sleepy in the later parts of the night and dosed off so that led to Robert and the narrator to have alone time to bond with each other. The bonding was good for the narrator because it led him to learning more about his own self. He never knew a blind man saw so much life without ever being able to actually see. The narrator felt so good that he saw a part of himself that he was once blind to.