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Steven Pataky
Prof. Cassvan
Engl. 791
May 2, 2016
The Blind Reading the Blind:
What Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” Can Do for Disability Studies
and What Disability Studies Can Do for Analyses of Representation
“…Men with duller vision have often, you know,
seen things before those who see more sharply.”
—Plato
Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral”1
is a modern-day parable, told from the
perspective of a nameless first-person narrator who is as plainspoken as he is evasive. It is
seemingly the story of a working-class American man in the late 1970s, mired in closed-
mindedness, loneliness, helplessness, and some degree of addiction, who learns to envision the
world anew after an unwanted visit from his wife’s blind friend. When the narrating husband and
Robert, a blind man, collaborate to draw a cathedral so that Robert might gain some knowledge
of “what a cathedral is[, w]hat they look like” (Carver 223), “the husband…also experience[s]
it for the first time and learn[s] to see and feel in another way” (Broyard 27). Most
commentators accept the act of drawing the cathedral with Robert as a “gesture of fraternity”
(Howe 1) that engenders an epiphany in which the narrator has come to confront the foolish
assumptions he previously held about the blind and the way they live. Drawing the cathedral
with closed eyes and Robert’s hand over his own, the narrator forms a connection between his
own experience of the world and that of his disabled and previously unwelcomed guest. “It’s
really something” (Carver 228), the narrator remarks to Robert in the last line of the story, his
eyes still closed, but what that something is exactly he never mentions. The overt ambiguity of
this “something” that the narrator experiences urges readers to challenge the nature of his
revelation and how it will shape his life henceforth with his wife, with himself, and with others.
More importantly, though, it compels readers to question their own interpretive procedures when
encountering characters with disabilities in literature and how those procedures reflect their real-
world encounters with the disabled. Unlike most of the critical readings of the story heretofore,
my reading treats the cathedral-drawing scene as one of inscription and meta-representation,
wherein the drawing is not an actual cathedral but a representation of the laborious process of
1
“Cathedral” first appeared in the March, 1981, issue of Atlantic Monthly and was an instant success, representing
the most anthologized and most frequently taught work of Carver’s oeuvre (Henningfeld 47). It became the title
piece of his 1983 collection of stories, which garnered nominations for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book
Critics Circle Award in 1984, and was included in The Best American Short Stories: 1982. Cathedral as a whole
cemented Carver’s reputation as a consummate writer of short fiction at the peak of his abilities, and the story that
gives the collection its title is invariably cited as an example of his superior artistry. In his Paris Review interview,
Carver describes the writing of “Cathedral” as a mystical experience: “When [What We Talk About When We Talk
About Love (1981)] was put together and in the hands of my publisher, I didn’t write anything at all for six months.
And then the first story I wrote was ‘Cathedral,’ which I feel is totally different in conception and execution from
any stories that have come before. …There was an opening up when I wrote that story” (Fires 204). Readers too,
perhaps, are meant to share in this mystical experience of a prominent writer writing a story about a mystical,
epiphanic experience between a disabled character and a non-disabled character.

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representation, made all the more complicated by the inclusion of a blind man as its co-creator.
Additionally, the interpretation of “Cathedral” I offer attempts to problematize what I term the
narrator’s epiphanic redemption, which has led critics away from a reading of the story that deals
specifically with the intricacies of disability. It will then become possible to read “Cathedral” not
as the story of a blind man who provides redemption to a sighted man who sorely needs
redeeming but as a story in which disability foregrounds the complex relationship between
representation and its interpretation.
At the time of “Cathedral’s” publication in the early 1980’s, serious political and ethical
discussions, reaching as high a forum as the United Nations, were already beginning to take
place regarding the experiences of people with disabilities, most notably in the form of the World
Health Organization’s (WHO) 1980 International Classification of Impairments, Disabilities,
and Handicaps (ICIDH), yet literary studies was relatively late in entering these discussions. By
the early 1990s, the ICIDH existed in thirteen languages, and over 25,000 copies of it were
distributed around the world. It is worth noting that the WHO’s ICIDH precedes the foundational
Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 by an entire decade and also the emergence of the field
of disability studies as we know it today in American academia, which did not take hold until the
mid-1990s. The first academic program officially dedicated to disability studies began at
Syracuse University in 1994 (coincidentally where Carver taught creative writing in the early
1980s) and the Modern Language Association did not establish the field as a “division of study”
until 2005 (Simon). This indicates that, while there has been a pressing need to sort out matters
of disability since at least the late 1970s, the field of disability studies as practiced in literature
departments has been relatively slow to keep up with this need. Consequently, critics have
remained stuck in threadbare conceptions of the disabled body, even when confronted with a
literary text as provocative as “Cathedral,” long after disability theorists have begun to move on
from them and explore new possibilities.
When the narrator and Robert join hands for their drawing, Carver’s story becomes for
readers a study in the myriad modes of representation that different bodies, both disabled and
non-, assume to interact with the world. Yet, critical readings of this frequently anthologized
story overwhelmingly treat of disability (when they treat of it at all, that is) in a manner devoid
of the complexity necessary to any worthwhile discourse on disability; for many critics, the
cathedral-drawing scene signifies little more than Robert’s attempt “to get some idea of what [a
cathedral] looked like” (Runyon 184). Such interpretations, I would argue, commit the error of
ignoring the all-important role that representation plays in the process of interpretation. To the
detriment of the story’s reception, the attention that critics do not pay to the process of
representation and how that process is linked to disability in “Cathedral” instead gets expended
on vapid readings of Robert’s disability. For the disabled and the non-disabled alike, no
interpretation comes into being without first passing through a complex system of
representational substitutions, of recognizing the similarities and differences between things. It
follows, then, that the insufficiency of representation, not Robert’s disability, prevents him from
gaining more than just “some idea” of cathedrals and gives even the sighted narrator only a
fragmented conception of them. The critical misreadings that posit the act of drawing the
cathedral as Robert’s transient exposure to sighted reality and the narrator’s opportunity to
experience blindness should give the conscientious reader pause. Given the specific historical
context of the story’s publication and subsequent popularity during a period of increasingly more
nuanced discussions about disability, such readings seem embarrassingly out of touch with
broader discussions of disability.

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Representation is “the creation and manipulation of signs,” where something “‘stand[s]
for’ or ‘take[s] the place’ of something else” (Mitchell, “Representation” 11). Difference—the
non-equivalence of one thing to another—necessitates representation and causes the interpreter
of a particular representation to discern similarities between things that are different, and to
complicate the process further, each interpreter can discern a unique set of similarities. For
instance, a cathedral and a drawing of that cathedral can bear any number of visual similarities,
yet they remain two quite different things. As W.J.T. Mitchell explains, “Every representation
exacts some cost, in the form of lost immediacy, presence, or truth, in the form of a gap between
intention and realization, original and copy” (21). The difference between a cathedral and its
representation in drawing may seem like an obvious point, but it will soon become clear, I hope,
that most criticism on “Cathedral” has disregarded this difference in order to advance a
redemptive interpretation of the story. Besides the representation embodied by the act of drawing
the cathedral, Robert’s disability is also given meaning by a subtle process of representation on a
cultural level.
One’s classification as a disabled person depends upon one’s bodily or mental difference
from the norm of a given society, and this identity, as Tobin Siebers observes, is entirely
contingent upon representation: “There are many physical differences among human beings that
simply do not count for identifiability. It is not the fact of physical difference that matters, then,
but the representation attached to difference…. Identity must be representable and communicable
to qualify as identifiable” (“Disability and the Theory of Complex Embodiment” 323). “The
body,” Siebers writes elsewhere, “does not determine its own representation in any way because
the sign precedes the body in the hierarchy of signification” (Disability Theory 55). Bodies, too,
inhere within the same system of signification that creates meaning in language and art, and they
are given meaning and significance themselves therein. Just as with a culture’s given language,
“social attitudes and institutions determine, far greater than biological fact, the representation of
the body’s reality” (Siebers 53-4). Insofar as our vocabulary and grammar are not our own but
are derived from the culture in which we live and from the particular place we occupy within that
culture, our ideas about the look of our bodies and the way they are supposed to function are
rooted in cultural representations of the body, including those found in advertisements, films, the
fine arts, literature, and scientific documents. Siebers goes on to suggest that “the disabled body
changes the process of representation itself. Blind hands envision the faces of old
acquaintances…. Different bodies require and create new modes of representation” (54). The
disabled body, then, exists in a culture the way a foreign word presents itself to a language, as an
abnormality measured against the supposed normality of the native tongue in question. Robert’s
blindness prevents him from seeing the televised representation of the cathedral, so he asks the
sighted narrator to draw one with him on heavy paper so that he can feel its shape. The “process
of representation” to which Siebers refers is de-familiarized for the narrator when Robert asks
him to draw a cathedral with his eyes closed, thus apparently curtailing his accustomed method
for representing in his mind what he perceives in the world. With the narrator’s eyes closed, the
drawing ceases to be, for him, a visual endeavor, a fairly simple rendering of a cathedral on
paper based on the appearance of an actual cathedral. Devoid of the possibility of any visual
significance, the blind sketch becomes entirely about the process of representation. The narrator
apparently realizes this by the end of the story, so when Robert instructs him to open his eyes
again, he remarks, “…I had my eyes closed. I thought I’d keep them that way for a little longer. I
thought it was something I ought to do” (Carver 228).

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This sort of thinking is seldom found in the criticism on “Cathedral.” Nelson Hathcock
concludes that the narrator’s “confrontation with Robert, the blind man, has astounding effects
on his own vision,” (37) and in similar fashion, Randolph Paul Runyon surmises that Robert’s
role in drawing the cathedral is “to get some idea of what it looked like” and in the process, he in
turn “is showing [the narrator] what it is like to be blind” (184). It would be inaccurate to suggest
that the narrator now sees the cathedral as a blind person would, as Robert, a blind person,
cannot see the cathedral at all. If he could, the description of cathedrals given by the narrator, the
drawing of the cathedral, and indeed the story “Cathedral” itself would not exist. The story is
only possible because of the gap that exists between Robert’s and the narrator’s conception of
what a cathedral is, a gap that cannot be reconciled merely by uttering or writing the word
“cathedral.” “If somebody says cathedral to you,” the narrator asks Robert, “do you have any
notion what they’re talking about? Do you know the difference between that and a Baptist
church, say?” (Carver 223-4), but there is no single correct explanation that Robert could provide
to affirm that he does indeed know what a cathedral is. Any explanation would have to be
rendered in the form of words, which would inevitably be no more accurate in describing an
actual cathedral than any words that the narrator himself could use to describe one. Whether we
are blind or sighted, we use words to understand the world, but since words are not the world,
our understandings will always be representations of that world, infinitely reproduced. Blindness
no more signals ignorance of the world than does one’s inability to find the right words to
describe it.
By the same token, what both Hathcock and Runyon overlook is that the experience of
closing one’s eyes is not a sufficient analogue for the experience of being blind. Robert literally
takes the narrator by the hand and guides him through the process we undergo when we try to
represent our ideas of reality in works of art, but this will do little to further the narrator’s
understanding of the stigmatization, discrimination, and marginalization that structures the
everyday experiences of people who live with disabilities. “This is not to say that nothing
benevolent happened in their encounter,” Eve Wiederhold qualifies in her astute reading of
“Cathedral.” “But expressing what happened is a completely different issue.” She goes on:
What they experienced as they clasped hands and embarked on a shared embodied
activity cannot be fully recuperated into a summary narrative that the rest of us
will recognize and deem significant. Nor is it certain that a language exists that
could convey what was specific to each of their experiences in this event. (113)
While the cathedral drawing is experienced differently by the non-disabled narrator and the
disabled Robert, it would likewise be experienced differently between two non-disabled
characters because the drawing of the cathedral will never be an actual cathedral, nor does the
story “Cathedral” resemble an actual cathedral in any literal way. The narrator explicitly turns
our attention to the very subjective nature of the drawing as he begins it: “First I drew a box that
looked like a house. It could have been the house I lived in” (Carver 227). The box is, of course,
not the house he lives in, nor is it likely that his house resembles a cathedral in size or shape, but
that he begins representing a cathedral as he would his own house demonstrates that he cannot
help but imagine a cathedral only in relation to other structures with which he is familiar. To
confuse the metaphorical vision of the imagination with the literal vision of the eyes and claim
that Robert has now shown the narrator what it is like to be blind would be to forgo all doubts
about the intricacies of intersubjectivity and to place the burden of the narrator’s transformation
squarely on the story’s disabled character. Robert’s experience of drawing the cathedral and of

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cathedrals themselves ultimately raises questions about the legitimacy of representational
experiences and how those experiences are shared.
More than demonstrating the difficulty that Robert as a blind person has in understanding
what a cathedral is, the story reveals that the process of representing in one’s mind what one sees
in the world is complex and circuitous for everyone, whether one is disabled or not, because the
world from which these representations are generated is itself always already fragmented and
understood piecemeal. As Wiederhold explains,
Carver’s story about the interpretive interactions between a man who has physical
vision and one who does not can be read to confound the logic that conflates
metaphorical vision with knowledge. ‘Cathedral’ not only calls attention to the
role of physicality in the work of interpretation, it also disavows the idea that such
work can itself be represented within narratives that aim to describe and then sum
up complex moments of thought and actions, memory and history, embodiment
and cognition. (99)
Wiederhold wisely draws our attention to the fact that interpretation, of texts or of the world, is
always work and must necessarily be so. When it fails to be work, when it is too facilely
produced, the result is sloppy criticism and tedious repetition of hackneyed explications. Thus,
when Irving Howe writes, “At the end, the two hands moving together—one guided by sight and
the other not—come to seem a gesture of fraternity” (1), one could just as well insist that the
narrator’s hand is not guided by sight at all when drawing the cathedral but instead by his
collective prior encounters with images and ideas of cathedrals. This is why the narrator
struggles when first trying to describe cathedrals to Robert and must rely on his knowledge of
structures more familiar to him: “To begin with, they’re very tall. …They’re so big, some of
them, they have to have these supports. …These supports are called buttresses. They remind me
of viaducts, for some reason” (Carver 224). Owing to any number of similarities between the two
structures—the prolonged duration of their construction, their importance to the community, the
materials used to build them, their size—the narrator is reminded of viaducts when he thinks of
cathedrals, even if he does not understand why. In trying to produce an intelligible interpretation
of cathedrals for the sightless Robert, the narrator himself quickly notices that having sight does
not grant him access to immediate experience of the phenomenal world. He attempts to clarify by
comparing cathedrals to viaducts but instantly discerns that this elucidation is just another
provisional interpretation. “But maybe you don’t know viaducts, either?” (224) he considers, and
with this realization, the work of interpretation is forced to continue indefinitely. “I’m not doing
so good, am I?” (225) the narrator asks, apologizing to Robert in recognition of his failure to
describe a cathedral accurately. The narrator is verbally trying to represent cathedrals for Robert
so that the latter will understand what they are, but in doing so, the narrator himself realizes his
own lack of understanding about cathedrals, something neither language nor his sight alone
could give him. It is not so much that the narrator lacks an understanding of cathedrals but more
so that he lacks an understanding of his understanding. Prior to this moment, he has never
attempted to consider the intricate system of relations upon which his knowledge rests.
When referring to the “physicality in the work of interpretation,” Wiederhold is pointing
to the fact that it is solely from the vantage point of our own bodies, be they disabled or not, that
we experience the world. In “Nature” (1836), Emerson relates that, in the woods, “I become a
transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through
me; I am part or particle of God” (12). Emerson’s transparent eyeball is his most celebrated
metaphor for the transcendental experience of absorbing nature fully and directly, but it is

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unsound in that it forgets, as W.J.T. Mitchell puts it, “that vision is itself invisible; that we cannot
see what seeing is; that the eyeball (pace Emerson) is never transparent” (“Showing Seeing”
166). For Emerson, the eyes are our unmediated connection to the outside world, but as the
narrator’s association of cathedrals with viaducts demonstrates, we only see and understand
objects in context as they relate to other objects. “The truth is,” the narrator acknowledges,
apologizing to Robert for his banal and non-vivid description of cathedrals, “cathedrals don’t
mean anything special to me. Nothing. Cathedrals. They’re something to look at on late-night
TV. That’s all they are” (Carver 226). For the narrator first to see the cathedral on TV during
Robert’s visit, as an image among an assortment of many other comparable images, is
appropriate as it pays heed to the fact that, just as the narrator and Robert are not experiencing a
real-life cathedral from the confines of the narrator’s living room, nor would they be
experiencing one in person if experiencing the cathedral entails the sort of unmediated, discrete
experience put forth by Emerson, an experience that divorces, in Wiederhold’s terminology,
work from interpretation.
We may not be able to see what seeing is, but a blind man teaching the sighted but
ignorant narrator of “Cathedral” to see in the metaphorical sense is integral to the plot of
Carver’s story. The act provokes an analysis of the narrative that forces its readers to think
through the difference between literal and metaphorical sight. More generally, it underscores the
ways in which disability blurs the divide between literality and metaphoricity by locating
metaphorical meaning in the impairments of literally disabled characters. In “Cathedral,” the
climactic scene of representation disabuses readers of the misapprehension that work is an
essential part of the interpretive process only for the disabled. Although critics have not failed to
attend to the metaphor of blindness at work in the story, their interpretations never move beyond
the metaphorical use of the word. Most critics follow Mark A. R. Facknitz in concluding that
“the narrator learns to see with eyes other than that insufficient set that keeps him a friendless
drunk and a meager husband” (295). Consequently, they read the narrator as a rather deplorable
human being whose much-needed change is facilitated by his “new eyes,” while they read
Robert as static and one-dimensional in his blindness. I take exception with this interpretation
because it persuades readers that the narrator now, as Kirk Nesset puts it, “emerges from
enclosure and transcends his self-strictures” (66) simply through his drawing of the cathedral
with the blind Robert when it would take more than a single moment to overcome his culturally
ingrained attitudes about the blind. Indeed, the language of confinement Nesset uses here echoes
the narrator’s declaration at the end of the story: “My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I
knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything” (Carver 228). Having closed eyes feels
ineffably liberating for the narrator, almost as if, after a life of miserable vision, the narrator’s
impression of his guest’s blindness is something that he comes to envy. I hasten to remind even
the most enchanted reader of “Cathedral,” though, that no matter how mesmerized the narrator
seems after drawing the cathedral with Robert at the conclusion of the story, he still is the non-
disabled member of their collaborative pair; he is still the one with physical sight, closed eyes
notwithstanding.
If the narrator is indeed rid of his prejudices as a result of the epiphany to which most
critics subscribe, the story will have succeeded in taking advantage of Robert’s disability:
whereas the narrator now both literally and figuratively sees the light, Robert only has a
figurative understanding of it and thus only functions as an instrument for the narrator’s
transformation. It is my contention that what their drawing of the cathedral foregrounds,
however, is the piecemeal artificiality inherent in all representation, and what Robert’s disability

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reveals to both the narrator and to the reader in the process is that we are all disabled if being so
implies a fragmented conception of the world and of ourselves. Carrie Sandahl argues that “it is
too easy to say ‘We’re all disabled.’ But it is possible to say that we are all disabled by injustice
and oppression of various kinds” (582). The point is not to efface disability and pretend that it
does not exist in literature or in the real world but instead to remember that representations of
disability dictate what we come to understand as its reality. “Disability serves representation as a
master trope for difference,” Sandahl explains. “Nondisabled artists in all media and genres have
appropriated the disability experience to serve as a metaphor expressing their own outsider
status, alienation, and alterity, not necessarily the social, economic, and political concerns of
actual disabled people” (584). “Cathedral” as a redemption narrative uses blindness to stand for
the narrator’s insularity and general dejection while forging no categorically meaningful
connection between the narrator and Robert; contrastively, “Cathedral” as a narrative about
representation, its power, and its discordancy speaks to both the difference between the non-
disabled narrator and the disabled Robert and to their similarity as participants in the power
structures that prescribe representations.
Ato Quayson explains that “in works where disability plays a prominent role, the reader’s
perspective is…affected by the short-circuiting of the dominant protocols governing the text—a
short-circuit triggered by the representation of disability” (15). Encountering disabled characters
like Robert in a literary text imbues the reader with a feeling of what Quayson calls “aesthetic
nervousness,” a sense of disquiet caused by the reader’s discomfort with the disabled body and
the way it is represented in a text. The reader affected by such a nervousness may even be
disabled him-/herself, as attitudes toward a certain social group can be and sometimes are held
by the members of that group. He goes on, “For the reader, aesthetic nervousness overlaps social
attitudes to disability that themselves often remain unexamined in their prejudices and biases”
(15). As readers’ real-world prejudices toward the disabled transfer to the page on which
disabled characters are represented, they become implicated in the narrator’s prejudices toward
the blind when they interpret “Cathedral” as a tale of the narrator’s epiphanic redemption, of the
literally blind leading the figuratively blind. In this reading, Robert’s blindness exists primarily
for the personal reformation of the imperfect but complex narrator and Robert himself is a
superficial stock character instead of a disabled person of commensurate complexity. In short,
Robert becomes, as the narrator incessantly refers to him throughout the story, “this blind man”
(209 and elsewhere), a synecdochical substitution whereby “this blind man” comes to stands for
“the blind” and all of the narrator’s preconceived ideas about them. Robert is inextricably bound
to the diverse group comprising the category of “the blind,” and if the narrator is to know him by
the end of the story, he knows him primarily as a blind man, especially if “this blind man”
provides his escape from insularity.
Polly Rose Peterson proposes that “Carver’s use of demonstratives and
possessives…draws readers close to the story’s narrator while simultaneously creating
psychological distance between the narrator and the other two characters in the story” (167). In
the first line of the story, the narrator says, “This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was
on his way to spend the night” (209), which gives readers “the impression that the speaker, in
this case the story’s narrator, is talking to the readers as if he knows them. The narrator’s tone is
colloquial and conversational” (Peterson 167-8). “By situating readers in a close, direct
relationship with the narrator and forcing them to view the world from the narrator’s
perspective,” Peterson concludes, “readers progress through a series of epiphanies, effectively
conveying the story’s central message on ‘blindness’ and spiritual awakening” (167). If there is

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an epiphany, it therefore does not belong to the fictional narrator so much as to the reader, who is
first made to identify with his prejudices and then is given an opportunity to make amends for
them at the end of the story. It would be naïve, however, to hold the narrator’s epiphany in
suspicion and not be just as doubtful about the epiphany of the reader, whose perspective is
heavily influenced by that of the narrator. From the outset, the narrator teaches readers how to
read the story and consequently how to interpret Robert’s blindness, but the latter’s disability
“short-circuits,” as Quayson puts it, any attempt on the reader’s part to interpret the story as “a
true case of the blind leading the blind” (Nesset 68). If “Cathedral” is that, then “the blind
leading the blind” does not refer to Robert and the narrator but to the narrator and the reader, the
latter of whom is led through the story by the narrator and then gains insight into how such
representations as “Cathedral” are constructed.
Wiederhold correctly diagnoses part of the problem posed by Robert’s blindness: “‘The
blind’ occupy a generic place of ‘the handicapped’ in U.S. culture, rarely seen, and when
represented, typically identified in terms of lacking vision, as if the totality of an identity can be
summarized with a single descriptor” (101). Essential to my reading of “Cathedral” is the
conviction that Robert is what David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder term a “narrative
prosthesis.” Mitchell and Snyder maintain that the “function [of people with disabilities] in
literary discourse is primarily twofold: disability pervades literary narrative, first, as a stock
feature of characterization and, second, as an opportunistic metaphorical device. We term this
perpetual discursive dependency upon disability narrative prosthesis” (47). Inasmuch as Robert
is one such narrative prosthesis, he must follow so many of his blind predecessors in western
literature and serve as the sagely blind figure existing primarily for the narrator’s moral
rectification. If Robert is a sage figure, then the idea of the narrator’s epiphany at the end of the
story is cruel, in that it exploits Robert’s blindness for the narrator’s moral benefit, turning his
disability into what Mitchell and Snyder call “an opportunistic metaphorical device” (47).
Robert’s disability may or may not provide the narrator with a lasting escape from insularity, but
it does indeed allow readers to evince their own metaphorical blindness vis-à-vis their
conception of the process of representation, and when read from the perspective of disability
studies, it empowers readers to read disabled characters with more care after the story is over
than that which they exercised when they began to read the story.
In rejecting what I have been referring to as “epiphanic redemption,” an interpretation of
the story which reforms the narrator but makes Robert’s disability, as Julia Miele Rodas points
out, a mere “figure of speech” (116), I mean specifically to put into question what Diane
Andrews Henningfeld hails as “this moment of epiphany, [where] the reader's experience of
reading ‘Cathedral’ suddenly seems to parallel the narrator's experience of drawing the
cathedral” (49). I contend that such an ephemeral revelation as that which takes place for the
narrator when he attempts to draw a cathedral does not function in the same way as it does for
the reader of the story “Cathedral,” as the reader’s revelation concerns his/her interpretations of
disabled characters within literary texts like “Cathedral” itself and how those interpretations have
been pre-fashioned by societal representations. Worse still, the analogy between the narrator’s
and the reader’s epiphany, which compels most of the critics of the story, rests upon outmoded
clichés in western culture concerning disability in general and the blind in particular in western
literature. The reason that this avenue has so seldom been explored in the criticism on
“Cathedral,” I believe, is that neither at the time of the story’s publication nor now in American
culture has blindness as a cultural-linguistic construct been given more than a cursory analysis by
disability theorists. In the worst of cases, as with Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s valuable but

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biased effort to use staring as a positive link between the disabled and the non-disabled, work
that is otherwise quite fruitful in devising strategies for negotiating the disabled experience
marginalizes the blind, pushing them further into the “generic place of ‘the handicapped’ in U.S.
culture” (101) described by Wiederhold.
In Staring: How We Look, Garland-Thomson claims that we will always stare at that
which is unfamiliar and novel to us. The starer and the staree engage in an intense human
interaction whereby the former has the opportunity to transform the staree’s appearance from
sensational and alarming to familiar and acceptable. “Bad staring,” Garland-Thomson outlines,
“fails to make the leap from a place of discomfort, shock, or fear toward empathic
identification,” whereas “good staring…reaches out[, so that] starers can identify with starees
enough to jumpstart a sympathetic response that is then ‘translated into action’” (187). Garland-
Thomson’s overarching contention is that when the most successful staring interaction is carried
out between two people, the starer will hold the staree in his/her eyes the way a mother lovingly
holds her child in her arms: “To be held in the visual regard of another enables humans to
flourish and forge a sturdy sense of self. Being seen by another person is key to our
psychological well-being, then, as well as our civil recognition” (194). The narrator holds Robert
in his visual regard, but this instance of staring can be categorized as nothing other than bad
staring. Although he admires the relative ease with which Robert makes his way around his
unfamiliar surroundings, the narrator cannot help noticing the abnormal appearance of his eyes:
At first glance, his eyes looked like anyone else’s eyes. But if you looked close,
there was something different about them. Too much white in the iris, for one
thing, and the pupils seemed to move around in the sockets without his knowing it
or being able to stop it. Creepy. As I stared at his face, I saw the left pupil turn in
toward his nose while the other made an effort to keep in one place. But it was
only an effort, for that eye was on the roam without his knowing it or wanting it to
be. (Carver 215-16)
The narrator enacts Michel Foucault’s “medical gaze” in this passage, which “draws on the
collective structure of medical experience to ‘see’ what occurs on the level of human tissue”
(Lange and Lu), and from that perspective, it is possible to imagine a disabled person or a person
suffering from a disease as little more than a collection of symptoms needing medical
intervention.2
The narrator sees only the “creepy” appearance of Robert’s eyes and can hardly
see past his impairment to the human being who suffers from it.
Garland-Thomson seems to have a hard time imagining the ways in which we connect
with our fellow human beings and gather knowledge about them to be anything but visual. How
can a blind person hold someone in his/her eyes to partake in this communicative volley between
starer and staree that Garland-Thomson feels is so vital to human relationships? Furthermore,
since “crucial to these interactions…is the role of the staree in the encounter” (188), how do the
blind even become aware that they are the objects of these stares when they cannot always (as
with the legally blind) or in some cases ever (as with the totally blind) see the people staring at
them?3
It seems to me that Garland-Thomson’s proposal for a productive method of staring that
2
In “An Overview of Telemedicine: The Virtual Gaze of Health Care in the Next Century,” Arushi Sinha writes, “In
the Western scientific tradition, vision is regarded as the sense least subject to interpretation of ambiguity of
meaning. Visual imagery is thought of as the most efficient mode of communication” (292).
3
One easily forgets that blindness/sightedness is a socially constructed binary which causes us to ignore the range of
visual ability in between these two extremes. Julia Miele Rodas points out that “blindness…is not the dark blank that
so many imagine, but is rather a continuum, or a variety, with such myriad gradations and such a jumbled diversity
of seeing and not-seeing that it becomes virtually impossible to put a finger on one point and to declare, ‘There! This

10. Pataky 10
can generate the foundation for understanding and tolerance does not account at all for the blind
and visually impaired. While the starer-to-staree interplay might prove auspicious for the sighted
members of the disabled community in their interactions with the non-disabled, it leaves the
blind in the disturbing position of living without a “sturdy sense of self,” “psychological well-
being,” or “civil recognition.”
Garland-Thomson’s oversight affirms that blindness is not akin to many other disabilities
that highlight the rift between the disabled and the able-bodied in the west. As Georgina Kleege
avers, “It is safe to say that blindness has held a particular fascination in every culture since the
beginning of time. Since sight is understood to be the predominant sense in humans, the loss of
sight is assumed to be tantamount to a loss of life, or a loss of fundamental quality that makes
someone human” (“Blindness and Literature” 113). Though socially and physically debilitating,
blindness, writes Naomi Schor, “is not always or even ever, strictly speaking, an illness” (78),
and because sight takes predominance, as Kleege points out, over the epistemological value of
our senses, blindness fits uncomfortably with other types of disability. As Rodas elucidates,
Our sense of blindness, our relationship to it, is structured around a universe of
blind heroes and villains, poets and seers[,]…in a way that can scarcely be
compared to any other manifestation of disability. Blindness is our metaphor for
fairness, for ignorance, for trust, for love, for vulnerability, for insensitivity. The
wealth of meaning that has been fabricated around the idea of blindness, our
cultural reliance on blindness as metaphor, thus metonymizes the blind man,
recreating him as a figure of speech, the component of a joke, a poem; or, the
same gesture enables all of us, blind or sighted, to recreate ourselves as
metaphorically blind. (116-17)
According to the WHO, “285 million people are estimated to be visually impaired worldwide: 39
million are blind and 246 have low vision” (“Visual Impairment and Blindness”). In spite of the
large number of people with even slight visual impairment, however, the symbolism of the blind
person in western literature is always riddled with confusion. At times he/she serves the role of
wise prognosticator, clairvoyantly presaging the events of the future with the accuracy that only
a physically sightless person can presumably muster, or else he/she treats present events from a
fresh and meaningful perspective, again, one that a sighted person could not have achieved
(Robert supposedly serves this role for the narrator in “Cathedral”). The blind person can,
because of his/her lack of sight, be a symbol of neutrality in justice and love, as is the case in the
Greek myths of Themis and Cupid. Other times, the blind person is the ignorant blockhead at the
butt of so many philosophical thought experiments, a figure who has come to be known as the
“hypothetical blind man,” used famously by Locke in the Molyneux problem.4
Here, physical
blindness is equated with one’s inability to grasp mentally that which is considered self-
explanatory. Still other times, blindness is represented as the worst fate imaginable, curable only
by a god, as when Jesus instructs his disciples that the blind man they have encountered during
person is sighted, and that one is blind.’ …In fact, what we usually think of as blindness, ‘true’ blindness, the total
absence of light perception or visual sensation, accounts for only about ten percent of those designated as legally
blind (117-18).
4
In the Molyneux problem, the seventeenth-century Irish scientist William Molyneux asked if a congenitally blind
man who knows a globe and a cube by touch would be able to properly identify the same objects by sight alone if
his vision were restored. The question galvanized Enlightenment philosophers, including Locke, Diderot, Voltaire,
and others, into giving serious thought to sensory perception, especially sight. “The Molyneux question,” writes
Kleege, “continues to be debated today, even though the history of medicine is full of case studies of actual blind
people who have had their sight restored by actual operations” (523).

11. Pataky 11
their travels “was born blind so that God’s power might be displayed in curing him” (Oxford
Study Bible, John 9:3).5
Blindness is curious among physical disabilities, as its hero/monster,
positive/negative, sage/fool treatment in western literature has condensed its metaphorical power
into the defining trait of a disabled subject, making it easy to read blind characters like Robert as
little more than an instrument for his sighted host’s transformation.
One has good reason, however, to condemn Robert’s function in the story as the blind
sage sent to reform the narrator’s wickedness. Wiederhold asserts that “Robert is typecast as the
‘blind man who has true wisdom,’ the image of which has been offered in films, and the result is
that this story of intimacy…is converted into a tale of decency and purity about an embodied act
of translation and interpretation” (103). Daniel W. Lehman is skeptical of the narrator’s
transformation having occurred at all:
Whether the narrator of ‘Cathedral’ prepares us for his eventual change is at best
questionable; the story’s ending in sudden epiphany still strikes many careful
readers as too good to be true. Is it really possible for the narrator, after a life-time
of symbolic blindness, to be endowed with healing vision in a single night? And if
he receives that ‘healing vision,’ why would he still sound like an unredeemed
narrator for the bulk of what is clearly a retrospective narrative? (8)
Indeed, the narrator’s prejudice toward the blind is initiated long before Robert’s undesired visit
and seems not to be aimed at Robert in particular. “My idea of blindness came from the movies,”
he admits in the beginning of the story. “In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never
laughed. Sometimes they were led by seeing-eye dogs” (Carver 209). The narrator’s sense of the
blind as sluggish, humorless, and hopelessly dependent on the help of seeing-eye dogs for
mobility betrays his condescending pity for them, and this mishmash of cultural stereotypes
about the blind quickly transforms into anxiety about this particular blind man’s visit to his
home, regardless of whether Robert is an old friend of his wife’s or not: “I wasn’t enthusiastic
about his visit. He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me. …A blind man in my
house was not something I looked forward to” (209). A bit later in the story, the narrator
remarks, “I’ve never met, or personally known, anyone who was blind” (215), and although he
has had no actual encounters with the blind, his perturbation over Robert’s visit is encouraged
completely by received ideas from the movies he has seen. By placing his anxieties in the past
tense, the narrator subtly reminds us that Robert’s visit is not about to occur but has occurred
already. As Lehman observes, the story is a retrospective narrative, and in telling it this way, the
narrator calls attention to the fact that, despite any identification readers may have with him, he
is indeed fictional and they, of course, are not. The narrator candidly lays bare his
misconceptions about the blind to the reader, noting his surprise that “[Robert] didn’t use a cane
and he didn’t wear dark glasses. I’d always thought dark glasses were a must for the blind”
(216). He also expresses shock at Robert’s penchant for cigarettes: “I remember having read
somewhere that the blind didn’t smoke because, as speculation had it, they couldn’t see the
smoke they exhaled. I thought I knew that much and that much only about blind people. But this
blind man smoked his cigarette down to the nubbin and then lit another one” (217). With
misbeliefs about and an intolerance toward the blind this well established, is an epiphanic insight
seemingly all that is necessary to redeem the narrator from his metaphorical blindness?
5
The gospels also treat the blind as ignorant when Jesus tells his disciples of the Pharisees: “they are blind guides,
and if one blind man guides another they will both fall into the ditch” (Matt. 15:14). This parable was the inspiration
for Bruegel’s 1568 painting “The Blind Leading the Blind,” considered a masterpiece of Renaissance art.

12. Pataky 12
True, Robert cannot see the image of the cathedral on television, but this does not mean
that his blindness precludes any understanding he might have of cathedrals, for as Kleege makes
clear, “the average blind person knows more about what it means to be sighted than the average
sighted person knows about what it means to be blind. The blind grow up, attend school, and
lead adult lives among sighted people. The language we speak, the literature we read, the
architecture we inhabit, were all designed by and for the sighted” (“Blindness and Visual
Culture” 522). One of the greatest values of disability studies for us as serious readers, as well as
human beings living beside one another in an increasingly more diverse world, is the way in
which the discipline can help us dispel the perennial misconceptions about all human bodies that
get displaced onto the disabled body, positioning the latter as an Other to an ostensibly normal,
healthy body. “Meeting able-bodied standards [should not] be thought to be a precondition of
being healthy or a constituent of health,” writes N. Ann Davis. “A person can be healthy without
being able-bodied, and someone who meets able-bodied standards can in fact have medical
problems that are serious, but nonobvious” (159). The conception of the body that imagines it as
physically, mentally, and emotionally robust, complete, impermeable, and of course, normal is
quite literally unrealistic. One need look no more closely than the cellular level of our bodies to
recognize their instability and the problems they produce to the idea of a unified subject. For
instance, epithelial cells in the human small intestine have a turnover rate (i.e. the time it takes
new cells to replaces dying ones) of approximately 2-4 days, while the turnover rate of skin cells
ranges anywhere from 10 days to a month. Then there are cells, such as neurons or the lens cells
of the eyes, which are believed to last a lifetime (Milo and Phillips). Because cells die and
regenerate at different rates (and even cells of the same organ do not all undergo this process in
unison), at any given moment, the body is only ever alive enough to maintain the life of the
subject. This process reveals that our bodies are in fact porous, malleable, and always contingent
upon the culture in which they exist for meaning.
Simply recognizing our conceptions of our bodies as fragile, however, is an inadequate
corrective, one that effaces the disabled experience altogether and relegates it to the nebulous
human condition. Sandahl points out that
Most people, even the most liberal and progressive among us, do not regard
disability issues as civil rights issues. Instead, they view disability through what
scholars have described as the ‘medical model,’ which considers people with
disabilities individual victims of medical pathologies, rather than a minority group
deserving of rights. (599)
After the disabled community transcends the medical model and gains acknowledgement as a
legitimate social group deserving of civil rights—a step evidenced worldwide by the ICIDH and
domestically by the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990—it is imperative that it takes heed
of its internal diversity. Chris Bell has condemned disability studies for its pretensions to all-
inclusiveness while ignoring the racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, and class differences that further
divide members of the disabled community:
As it stands, Disability Studies has a tenuous relationship with race and ethnicity:
while the field readily acknowledges its debt to and inspiration by inquiries such
as Black Studies, its efforts at addressing intersections between disability, race,
and ethnicity are, at best, wanting. Disability Studies claims to examine the
experiences of a vast number of disabled people, yet the form that representation
takes is, far too often, a white one. (377)

13. Pataky 13
Just as important, I believe, is to ensure that literary studies sufficiently keeps abreast of the
advancements in the disabled community at large. Canonical literary works like “Cathedral” help
us better understand the laboriousness of representation, how representations determine
classifications of disability, and finally how disability can turn those classifications back on
themselves. When the narrator remarks at the end of “Cathedral,” “But I didn’t feel like I was
inside anything” (Carver 228), this “anything” can be read to mean his house, his body, the
literary text in which he resides, and indeed anything else which confines him and closes off
meaning. If our idea of our bodies is that they are static, complete, and normal, then thinking
seriously about disability shows us that we too are not inside anything.

14. Pataky 14
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