Passage analysis essay revision on CATHEDRAL BY Raymond Carver’s

Name
Age
DateRaymond Carver in the passage “Cathedral”
Human beings have many ways of perceiving and interacting with the world around us. We are able to use visual and verbal cues to communicate with each other. From an extract from Raymond Carver “Cathedral” the narrator shows how we perceive people who are visually impaired (Carver, 168). He looks at how the visually impaired person communicates with his wife.
The blunt, insensitive, and indifferent language the narrator uses to describe the blind’s man wedding, marriage, and his wife. Beulah suggests that blindness can manifest itself in many ways, including the figurative form of blindness, and the ignorance toward the feeling of others.
The way the narrator talks about the blind’s man wedding indicates that he has emotional and psychological blindness that he perceives the world only from a visual perspective. For example, he says about the wedding “it was a little wedding-who would want to go to such a wedding in the first place?” (carver 168). He fails to acknowledge that human beings can communicate verbally and relate well to each other.
The narrator has a shallow personality, and he fails to understand why would a blind man have a wedding. “All this without having ever seen what the goddamned woman looked like. It was beyond my understanding” This perception is brought about by the fact that bridegroom is visually impaired. He fails to understand that human beings can still experience life despite being visually impaired.

The narrator cannot see the world from a different perspective, and cannot understand the value of seeing people from multiple points of view. He cannot look beyond the visual perspective. There is more to a human being than their visual appearance.
The way the narrator talks about the blind’s man marriage in contrast to his wife Beulah show that he is inconsiderate to other people inner feelings and they are what he would consider normal. For instance, he says the following about the blind man “I felt sorry for the blind man for a little bit. And I found myself thinking what a pitiful life s woman must have lead” (Carver 168). The narrator doesn’t see the blind man as a complete person, and that’s is why he thought about him just for a little bit and then he shifts his all attention to Beulah because he sees her as a normal person just like him.
The narrator to some extent dehumanizes the blind man by not giving him a name, and constantly calls him the blind man, as if that is all he is. On the other hand, he mentions Beulah’s name five times, which indicates a lack of understanding of people beyond their physical appearance. A name gives human dignity and when he refers to a man as “the blind man” he takes away his dignity.
In conclusion, we can see how the narrator puts an overemphasis on the visual senses. He belittles the blind man just because he is visually impaired. He fails to understand that he can still communicate verbally to express himself and achieve a fulfilling life.
Cited works
Carver, Raymond. Cathedral. Knopf, 1984, pp. 164-168.