In life we learn missing lessons, but most of the lessons we learn come from things we would not expect them to come from. This is definitely the situation for the narrator in Raymond Carver's short story "Cathedral". The narrator’s wife is expecting a visit from an old friend from back in the day. Yet, the narrator is not looking forward to the wife’s old friend visit. He is not really comfortable with the entire idea of this man coming to his house. He doesn’t really like the relationship his wife and the old friend have, and he especially despises the fact that the man seems to be blind. "A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to"(pg 28) he remarked. The vigor of his prejudice is shocking. He was prepared to undergo what he thought would be a disagreeable experience, if only to satisfy his wife. The narrator had no clue that this visitor would have an astonishing effect on how he saw the world, and would change his outlook of life, of blind people, and of himself from that day forward.
In the story, that takes place in Connecticut the narrator's wife informs him that an old friend of hers, who happens to be blind a blind man, is coming to stay with them. The blind man was someone his wife had worked for one summer in Seattle and had kept in touch with her ever since. They remain in contact by sending cassette tapes instead of letters over the years. The narrator was a bit envious of the close attention and constant communication his wife shared with the blind man. "Over the years, she put all kinds of stuff on the tapes and sent the tapes off lickety-split....She told him everything, or so it seemed to me." (29) The friendship his wife shared with the blind man made him a bit uneasy, and the fact that he was blind made it even worse. I can understand why it would’ve made the narrator uneasy, it seems to me the blind man and his wife communicated more the narrator and his wife. So the narrator is certainly not looking forward to the...