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After an evening of heavy drinking and pot smoking, the narrator turns on the television and begins to describe what he sees to the blind man. When clips of a cathedral appear on the screen, the narrator, ever inarticulate, is unable to describe a cathedral. The blind man teaches the narrator to "see" the cathedral through drawing. .
Summary.
The narrator, or storyteller, of Raymond Carver's short story "Cathedral" opens by saying, "This blind man, an old friend of my wife's, he was on his way to spend the night." The narrator goes on to explain that after the blind man's wife died while visiting her relatives in nearby Connecticut, he had called the narrator's wife from his in-laws' and made arrangements to visit. The narrator admits he is not excited about the visit. "He was 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 seeing-eye dogs. A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to.".
The narrator then tells the story of how his wife met the blind man. She had been engaged to marry an officer in training at the end of the summer. Neither of them had jobs. She saw an advertisement for a job reading to a blind man. During the time she worked for him, she and the blind man became friends. On her last day working for him, the blind man asked her if he could touch her face, and she let him. Then, she married the officer-to-be and moved away. But she and the blind man kept in touch. Her marriage deteriorated as she traveled around the country with her husband, and through her subsequent suicide attempt, separation and divorce, she and the blind man kept in touch. Now, after all these years, the blind man was coming to sleep in the narrator's house.
The narrator decides to have a conversation with his wife about the impending visit, and she asks him to try to make the blind man comfortable.
