Friendship

A detailed Summary of Friendship

In Raymond Carver's story, "Cathedral", there are three main characters that includes the wife, husband, and Robert. The husband thinks that the blind man is coming to his house to snatch his wife away from him. The husband is jealous of the blind man at the beginning of the story, but he later becomes friends with the blind man after understanding that blind man is just a friend of his wife.

The husband rejects the idea of a blind man in his own house. "A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to" (32). This shows that the husband wants the house to his wife and himself and the two of them only. At this point in the story, I feel he's just like any other man that's fighting for his own family's territory. The space is about to be invaded by a predator, the blind man that is going to stay at his house. The husband has an animal type mentality where he protects his mate and fights off other males who he considers an enemy. The husband feels like he's going to be left out when Robert arrives at his house.

The wife tells her husband the story of how she met Robert in Seattle when she was working for him. Robert asks the wife if he can touch her face on the last day worki

ng with him. She grants him access to her face as Robert "touched his fingers to every part of her face, her nose-even her neck" (33). This illustrates how close a friend the wife and the blind really are. She allows a man who she has known only a few months to touch of body, especially the face. Touching the hands or arms would seem fine, but the face is precious part of a woman's body. The thought of having a man having his hands all over your wife would make any man go crazy. The fact that the same man is coming to stay under the same roof as his wife makes the husband have an uneasy feeling about Robert. He's already touched the wife's face--the husband might be thinking what part of the body is the blind man going to feel up next.

The husband tries a lot of ways to get the blind man away from his wife. The jealousy goes as far as offering the blind man drugs. Each plan that the husband plans out seems not to work. The husband finally realizes that the blind man is just a friend of this wife. So at the end, he starts being more receptive of the blind man's stay at his house instead of pushing the blind man away. The two of them come together to draw a cathedral to show the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

The husband tries anyway to make the blind man look like he's a bad guy by asking him "to smoke some dope" (37). By doing this, he's trying to make his wife think that Robert does bad things. Smoking up marijuana is a terrible and illegal thing to do in most families. On the other hand, this couple thinks smoking up is a normal thing to do. The wife later walks into the room and rolls up a joint with them also. This shows the plan that the husband wanted to show that the blind man was a drug addict didn't work. Nothing that that the husband is trying seems to be effective as he thinks of another way to get the attention of his wife back on him instead of the blind man.

The husba

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1300
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Miscellaneous