To See Is To Feel

When viewed as a whole, Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” tells a provocative story of the main character’s strange yet meaningful experience of metaphorically learning to see life from the point of view of a blind man; however, the story also recounts the relationship between the main character’s wife and the blind man, Robert, from whom he learns to see. Half of the story is about the interactions between the wife and Robert, and when viewed as a tale about this connection, Carver’s short story offers much more insight into the concept of seeing. For both the wife and, at the end of the narrative, the main character, true sight becomes second to the sight of feeling.

The wife is set in the story as a sensitive person who has experienced a full array of feeling in life. She writes poems, and in such a context can be viewed as one in touch with her self and with her reactions to the situations life places her in. Therefore, Robert’s touching her face bore special significance, as did the loneliness of being a military wife that culminated in her attempted suicide. The wife, as one who went from love to solitude to near-death, is therefore a means to understand the individual who most needs the comfort of others in life. She needs someone to talk to as much as her blind employer needs someone to read to him.

Robert, therefore, becomes a key figure in her life as one to whom she can tell everything. He becomes essentially her best friend and her confidant. By such a close bond, the wife learns to express and understand her emotions and therefore learns to ‘see’ by feeling. Such metaphorical sight in which she can both be completely understood and completely understand her closest friend invariably provides the wife with happiness and stability.

Though her husband mocks her for this bond of sight, he, too, learns to see by feeling. The main character is in many ways stuck in the same situation that his wife was once trapped in; he has no friends, he works in a job he doesn’t like, and he is detached from life to the point that he feels jealousy when his wife speaks of Robert and his only source of pleasure is smoking pot late at night. Therefore, when Robert has him draw a cathedral, the real re-learning to see takes place on the emotional level. The main character experiences what his wife found in Robert—the ability to feel connected with another individual on a level that transcends physicality. By the end of the story, both he and his wife are brought into a better state of living by the connection of feelings in which one is able to truly see and understand oneself. Such a new state of sight is “like nothing else.” (474)