Vision Beyond Eyesight

Poetry, art, and music are things that must be looked at in different ways. Poetry is not read with only the eyes, but also with the heart. Art is not only about what is visible, but the thoughts, images, and emotions it provokes. Music is not only read on paper, but performed, felt, and experienced. The necessity to experience life beyond physical sight is what Raymond Carver attempted in his short story Cathedral. He created a character that needed to learn a lesson about how to see the world without sight. The narrator, who remains unnamed throughout the story, was blinded by jealousy, by drugs and alcohol, and by the lack of understanding, but learns to see not only with eyes, but with hands, and with his soul.

The narrator was blinded by his use of alcohol and drugs. Because of his desire to block out the world and his wife’s stories, he drank hard liquor. He drank so frequently, in fact, during a conversation, his wife had to ask him if he was drunk. The use of alcohol and drugs limited his view of the world to what he saw before him. In the story, he, his wife, and the blind man drank Scotch and smoked a mild joint. While the use of alcohol and dope was a normal experience to the narrator, the blind man had another agenda in mind. The blind man used made the narrator feel comfortable with him and caused the narrator feel like he had an out of body experience. “I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything” (Carver, 1983, p. 418). He let go of his sense of sight and saw with his soul. Until this transformation at the end of the story, the narrator continued his limited view of the world.

This limited view gave him an attitude that made unable to see anything beyond his own line of sight. If it was not something that he could see with his own eyes, then it was meaningless. Because of this attitude, he could not understand how a woman could love a blind man, or how a blind man could love a woman without seeing her with his eyes. “They’d married, lived and worked together, slept together-had sex, sure-and then the blind man had to bury her. All this without his having ever seen what the goddamned woman looked like. It was beyond my understanding” (Carver, 1983, p. 410). Because of his lack of understanding, he never considered the value of the sense of touch.

This lack of understanding continued throughout the story. The narrator did not understand how to relate to anything past his line of sight, and because of this, he did not understand how to find meaning in poetry. His wife wrote, “a poem or two every year” (Carver, 1983, p.408), but he did not like it. His excuse was, “Maybe I just don’t understand poetry” (Carver, 1983, p.409). This lack of understanding of his wife’s poetry was intensified by his intense feeling of jealousy.

He was blinded by jealousy. His jealousy was strong enough to make him not name men who his wife had known in the past. He did not see his wife’s ex-husband so he didn’t have a name. “Why should he have a name?” (Carver, 1983, p. 409). He had never met the blind man, as a result, until the narrator saw the blind man with his own eyes, he was referred to as, “The blind man” (Carver, 1983, p. 408). But when it came to the blind man’s wife, Beulah, he spoke about her by her proper name. The difference, between when he could use a proper name or not, demonstrated how jealous he was of the blind man. Again he showed jealousy when detailing how his wife sent tapes to the blind man detailing everything that happened in her life. He did not care until he was listening to one of the tapes from the blind man. “I heard my own name in the mouth of this stranger, this blind man I didn’t even know” (Carver, 1983, p. 409)! This jealousy blinded him from understanding the world, and blinded him to the meaning that people could have in his life.

He extended this lack of meaning from people to objects and to the world. He could not consider what a cathedral was without looking around the room to find something within his line of sight that would give him the answer. To the narrator, a cathedral, “Don’t mean anything special” (Carver, 1983, p. 416), and they are just “something to look at on late-night TV” (Carver, 1983, p. 416) and nothing more. His perspective was very narrow blinding him from seeing the value in people and the world.

The blind man gave the narrator another perception of the world. Things can be touched and felt even without sight. Things can be experienced and meaning can be found through that experience. Looking at the world through the sense of touch never occurred to the narrator until he was taught by the blind man. He experienced this lesson through the drawing of a cathedral with the blind man. He watched as the blind man felt the paper with his fingers. “He went up and down the sides of the paper. The edges, even the edges. He fingered the corners (Carver, 1983, p. 417). He closed his eyes and let the blind man guide his hand. This experience changed the way he viewed the world. “His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now” (Carver, 1983, p. 418). By watching the blind man experience art through the touching a piece of paper, and not through sight, changed the narrator’s view of the world. There is more to be seen than what was visible before him.

Through the nameless narrator in Cathedral, Raymond Carver proves to his readers that the world is not bound by the sense of sight. He learns to experience life through his sense of touch, and through his soul. There is no question that the narrator of the short story changed his point of view about life. He will see a different world when he opens his eyes again.
 
References
Carver, R. (2004). Cathedral. In S. Lynn (Ed.), Literature: Reading and writing with critical strategies. (pp. 408-418). New York, NY: Pierson Longman.