Paper Topic:

Arguing from Experience

Arguing from Experience Cathedral , Raymond Carver 's short story from the collection of stories with the same title , is a concise guide to the nature of human interaction and the role prejudice and intellectual blindness play in communication . The narrative includes only three people , the narrator his wife and Robert , a visitor to their house . The fact that Robert is blind irritates the narrator , as well his long-term relationship to his wife . Starting from intense protest to Robert 's visit and repulsion , the narrator is miraculously transformed when he is doing a

simple project with Robert : drawing a cathedral when guiding Robert 's hand moving across the . A change in the narrator 's attitude indicates his liberation from his prejudice replaced by compassion and human attitude The author in this story first of all focuses on liberation from a specific kind of blindness - moral blindness caused by prejudice and bias , something that is more serious and impairing than real blindness

The path to liberation from stereotypes for the narrator in Cathedral ' starts from the first moments of the story . The narrator 's reaction from the start seems overstated as he vehemently rejects the presence of the blind man in his house : He was no one I knew . And his being blind bothered me ' Putting blindness as the reason for his distaste , the narrator appears to be a very self-centered person . Blind to the feelings of people around him , he seems immersed in his own prejudice and narrow-mindedness . He does not even have power to attend to the needs of his wife bound to the blind man by a long-term friendship and willing to see him in their house as a way to support the man after his wife 's death . The author seems prejudice that looks like instinctive aversion of the healthy man toward an unhealthy one : But he didn 't use a cane and he didn 't wear dark glasses . I 'd always thought dark glasses were a must for the blind His prejudice makes him see the blind man through the prism of his bias blinding him to the real personality of the man who seems to be a cheerful and pleasant person . Only in his drawing project does he shed his blindness and get a glimpse into human personality , stating that his guiding experience is really something (515

Moral blindness is something that many people have experienced in one form or another . Stereotyping has become the norm in human communication as more and more people accept seeing their friends and peers as representatives of a class and attribute to them all the fixed ideas about this class . I faced this situation in my high school class when a group of students were trying to bully a girl who did not fit into their ideas of `coolness . She did not only wear clothes different from what everybody had on - she was music , saw different movies , and read books that were beyond their understanding . Her family was so...

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