Gunja Shah
Block 6 (Honors Short Fiction)
9/29/2014
The Beliefs of the Narrator
There are 295 million visually impaired people in the world. It is said that many will know at least one in their lifetime by the WHO, world health organization. Although so many people are blind, the majority of the population discriminates them like the narrator does in the story "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver. The narrator in the story discriminates the blind man Robert by being something of his wife's past in the beginning of the story to the very end until he realizes that he needs to change. A dynamic character of the story "Cathedral" is the narrator himself because he changes from a person who is blind to a man that transcends his close minded set of beliefs by the help of the real blind man Robert.
Unlike Robert, the narrator can see but he has difficulty understanding and expecting people who are different than him.
English: Screen short of the Narrator controls in ...
Microsoft Narrator
The "Japanese" narrator of My Japan.In the beginning of the story, when his wife talks about the blind man coming to visit her, then narrator is not exuberant about meeting someone new which is shown when he says "I wasn't enthusiastic about his visit. He is no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me. My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed. Sometimes they were led by eye seeing dogs. A blind man in the house is not something you look forward to" (138). This demonstrates how his world is so tiny. Even though there are 39 million people that are blind in the he has never met one let alone is interested in meeting one. This quote show how insensible he is, though he has the knowledge...