Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Describe narrator's epiphany at the end of "Cathedral".

In the story "The Cathedral," the narrator's wife has a
visitor coming to stay for a short time, a blind man named Robert who the narrator's
wife used to read for.


She has not seen Robert since her
divorce and remarriage to the narrator, but Robert has since lost his wife, to whom he
was very close.


The narrator has no sympathy for the blind
man, behaving abominably toward their guest, much to his wife's dismay.  When the
narrator's wife retires for the evening, the narrator and Robert stay up, while the
narrator thoughtlessly watches the television, trying to relay the images to Robert who,
of course, cannot see them.


When a program comes on and
describes a cathedral, the narrator struggles to describe what he sees with mere words.
 At this point Robert asks the narrator to get paper and a pencil in order to draw the
cathedral, and the narrator complies.  Then Robert tells the narrator to start to draw,
while Robert's hand rests upon the narrator's.  With encouragement from Robert, the
narrator starts to sketch.


Then Robert tells the narrator
to close his eyes and continue to draw.  As he does so, the
narrator notes something extraordinary happening to him.  His short moment of
"blindness" has allowed the narrator to "see" what he could not "see" before.  Robert
tells the narrator he can open his eyes, but still he does
not.


By closing his eyes, the narrator, knowing the
physical boundaries of the rooms, of his home, feels that there are no boundaries at
all. He is somehow freed from his preconceived notions of his wife's friend, the man's
blindness, and what he has perceived up until now as his own superiority in the order of
things.  His hostility and jealousy toward Robert vanish, the sense of separation he
felt from Robert because of Robert's infirmity disappears, and the narrator senses that
something new has awakened within him and that he will be able to be a different person
with this new "insight" he has of the world and his place in it.  He is a fortunate man
to have been given the chance to see the world from a different perspective and chose to
use this experience to change himself.


This is the epiphany
the narrator experiences at the end of the story.

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