The entire story revolves around the narrator’s reaction to this visit and what he does throughout the evening to try to cope with entertaining a blind man. This man is blind and has recently lost his wife. His wife is more open to new experiences and has invited a man to the house for the evening with whom she used to work. The man in the couple is the narrator of the story and quickly reveals himself to be a blue-collar worker, rarely thinking beyond his relatively narrow comfort zone. The story conveys the events of a single evening in the home of a childless couple as they receive a visitor. In this story, Carver questions our assumptions about vision, what it is, and what is important for us to see by using narration, imagery, and contrast to bring his character from shallow living to transcendent understanding. An example of this can be found in Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral”. Symbols can be as obvious as a great building or as subtle as the narrative tone or contrasts made.īy carefully constructing the symbolism conveyed through these techniques, writers are able to question much of our assumed knowledge by forcing us to take a new look at an old idea. Anything within the story can provide symbols or clues as to the underlying theme or message of the story. As a result of these techniques, short stories have a way of conveying sometimes very complex thoughts in very simple and understandable terms that appeal to more levels of understanding than mere intellect.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |