Best of the Week: Curiosity and Noticing

In this very limited week, two topics especially caught my attention. While discussing "Cathedral" in class, Zoe brought up the narrator's lack of curiosity and emotion, which contributed to his wife's discontent with him. Also, Mr. Allen raised the point that the only character to receive a name in the story was the blind man, Robert, which interested me.

Zoe's insight allowed for a deeper understanding of the short story, "Cathedral," but I felt like the message could be applied to my own life as well. The narrator seems like a nice enough guy, and as a reader I cheered for him throughout the story, but as evidenced by that same story, being nice isn't always enough. In order to get the full experience out of not only your relationships, but your life in general, one must possess curiosity and emotion. Simply going through the motions does not cut it when it comes to establishing connections with people. In the story, the tape is cut off right before Robert was about to give his opinion of the husband, and the husband was just fine with that. What is life without the drive to learn and know more about yourself and the world around you. This lack of fire inside of the narrator could play a major role in his wife's unhappiness. This reminds me to constantly to be striving for knowledge and self-bettering, because you can never know enough. According to "Cathedral," inquisitiveness is looked upon with respect from others, not as an annoyance.

The short story also emphasizes the importance of emotion in one's life. What I got from the story was that it was possible to like someone you can't connect with emotionally, but impossible to love someone of the same nature. That being said, it was interesting to see the emotionless narrator placed in a situation where love is implied, and seeing how he dealt with it. Mr. Allen filled in the blank left by the blind man with "I can only conclude-he's just like your last husband." We all know how that went, and if Robert was right, the narrator had to make a change in his mindset and point of view if he hoped to remain married to his wife. With such a short sampling of his life, it is impossible to know whether or not he ever made that adjustment, but it looked like he was heading in the right direction.

Finally, I found it very interesting how something as simple as giving the blind man a name could mean so much to the story. It made me wonder how I could improve such subtleties in my writing to make the reader's experience that much better. These structural nuances are what set the great writers apart from the good ones.