confinement

The Cathedral appeared to be, with my first, unfocused glance, a book without substance – mere fluff, as of so many pillows. Words, words, and words, and, behind them, no meaning to be teased out. It remained much the same in my mind as I read on, looking upon the author’s narrow, inflexible views; the last page, however, changed my stance.  

A cathedral was built with blindness, for in the absence of sight – so unlike the presence thereof – there are no edges; no constraints. He’d made for his wife and himself a home; a home born of the stagnant money of the stagnant career of a stagnant man with open, fluid eyes that limit him. A contradiction, this – are not eyes the means of growth, not the opposite?  

They are, I’d say, but, as evinced by The Cathedral, every point at which one grows – every recollection of the narrator with his wife’s sending of tapes – fixes in one’s mind the very walls that impede said change. The cathedral’s gradual construction by Robert and ‘Bub’ – our unchanging narrator – is the incremental motion away from these walls; steps, built ever upward, towards understanding, and, from it, an absence of limitations.  

Raymond Carver, with this depiction of cathedrals, contradicts the conventional view of epiphanies, implying that they gradually come to be with exposure to contrary ideas. The reflection that inevitably occurs in the wake of this cements the epiphany, making seen the flaws in one’s past state – dissolving, if you will, the trappings of a house. 

 The Cathedral’s plot parallels this process; from the unformed exposure that is the narrator’s initial encounter with Robert, to the reflection that is the time spent watching television by ‘Bub’ and ‘the blind man’, to the eventual, solid epiphany in seeing the freedom that comes of blindness.  

The narrator’s exposure is in his first meeting with Robert, for he’s yet to understand how thoroughly Robert’s way of ‘blindness’ contradicts his own manner of living; he, consequently, cannot reflect, for there’s, at that point, no flaw in his present self. After sharing a meal with the blind man, ‘Bub’ goes on to do what he always does after a meal, and smokes a joint. As his wife falls asleep, Bub and Robert come to speak of cathedrals, with Robert, given his blindness, asking to know of the buildings. Bub, at first, seeks to define them – until, at last, he comes to see that he can’t do so fully, and that the ideas born of his sight do nothing but limit his ability to do so.  

This is his reflection, and is evinced by him saying that cathedrals aren’t of any particular value to him – a leaving behind of prior notions that’d typically define cathedrals as something or another, and an acknowledgement that there are, within them, failings. This point, more than any other, leads Bub to work with Robert in the drawing of the cathedral, for he, if only vaguely, sees the merit of blindness. The cathedral is then drawn, Robert’s hand guiding Bub all the while; the unseeing granting the seeing the means of accomplishing something. This last event leaves the narrator with the realization that through blindness alone – in lieu of his previous bigotry and other conceits – can he act without trappings. This is the realization that cements Bub’s reflections, and makes of them an epiphany – the final piece in the building of his cathedral.