Cathedral
A common and natural thing that we all do when we meet new people for the first time is to put them into boxes. By putting people into boxes we create prejudices, which is very hard to get rid off. Especially if we meet someone who has a handicap we start to get nervous and many hides their “fear”, thinking that the person with the handicap can’t see or feel our discomfort. But a blind person for example, can easily sense out fear and insecurity because he has a bigger awareness. But if we act nervous around blind people when we meet he/she for the first time, we should act different every time we meet new people. Because there are many ways of being blind and most people are ...view middle of the document...
The other element is how realistic his characters are.
Our main character is a typical Raymond Carver male character. He is a regular middle-age man looking for meaning in his life and is in reality struggling with jealousy and loneliness. Just like many of Raymond Carvers other characters he has a better way at looking at the world in the end, than in the beginning. He doesn’t have many friends and no religious belief either, so he drinks his sorrow away in whisky. The only friend he has is his wife, with whom he is not close and is fighting with her most of the time. Despite their fighting and constant whickering they still care about each other, “”If you had a friend, any friend, and that friend came to visit, I’d make him feel comfortable”” (page 2, lines 20-21) and “I saw my wife laughing as she parked the car. Just amazing.” (Page 2, line 47). Nerveless they are two contracts, where she has compassion and shows sympathy for others, whilst he is an egotist. It doesn’t say exactly that he is an egoist but his words implicate and reveal how ignorant and judgemental he is, which is also characteristic for Raymond Carvers way of writing. An example of that is when he calls Robert “the blind man” and not by name. Robert is an old friend of the main character’s wife, whose own wife just died; therefore he is staying with them. The narrator is very uncomfortable with Robert around, which has something to do with his own insecurity. His wife had a job where she took care of Robert and now they have a special bond. It...