"Cathedral"
Raymond Carver's, "Cathedral," was a very unique short story and I enjoyed reading it because it seemed to sort of teach a lesson. The story begins by making a clear display of the husband's feelings toward the blind man, Robert, and how he seemed to almost have a feeling of disgust toward him. I believe this feeling came from his inability to relate to Robert. However, by the end of the story, the husband's outlook has completely changed because the experience of drawing a cathedral with Robert allowed him to experience a little of what his life is like, thus making him able to relate more.
A couple quotes stood out in the text. On page 110, the husband is speaking about his wife's experience with her first marriage and how badly it affected her. He says, "She got to a feeling she couldn't go it another step. She went in and swallowed all the pills and capsules in the medicine chest and washed them down with a bottle of gin. The she got into a hot bath and passed out." I was utterly shocked while reading this because of the way Raymond Carver changed the subject so quickly. One moment he was describing the relationship between the wife and her first husband and the military, and the next moment he has switched to an extremely depressing subject. I felt that the wife's reaction to moving around was a bit extreme and because suicide is so dramatic in the middle of the context of the story, this scene jumped right off the page. The second quote that made me think was on page 111, "All this without having ever seen what the goddamned woman looked like. It was beyond my understanding. Hearing this, I felt sorry for the blind man for a little bit." After reading this, I realized how truly depressing it would be to never be able to see what the person you're in love with looks like. I know that for me, personally, I'm not sure how I would handle being in a situation like that. I feel that despite how much personality and mental connection matter, being able to see your "lover" is equally as important. After all, I believe that one's initial attraction to someone is based solely on their attraction to the other's appearance. This quote made me feel very bad for the blind man, even if it didn't matter that much to him.
My overall reflection on this short story, aside form the plot, was that I realized that Raymond Carver seems to use a lot of repetition throughout the story. At first it was only the wife who kept asking or saying the same things over and over, but then on page 118, the husband begins to to it as well. I'm not quite sure what Carver was trying to get at by being so redundant, but it definitely caught my attention while reading. Also, my own personal connection with the story was the fact that Robert kept calling the husband "bub," because I use the same nickname with my friend--and its not a very common nickname!
"The Things They Carried"
Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" went about telling a story in two different ways: imagery and repetition. There were also two sides to the story: a love story, and the mens' battle at war. O'Brien's allusion to "the things they carried" served as a deeper meaning than literally what they carried. Although he does describe exactly what each troop carried and how much it weighed, the deeper meaning to this was the mental weight that war held in the troops' minds. The way that O'Brien also describes each and every element that the men are carrying allows us, as readers, to picture them "humping" all these things around and how much weight truly lies on them. The story sort of gives the audience an insight to men's lives at war and the toll that it takes on their mental state.
The love story portion of "The Things They Carried" was what actually caught most of my attention. On page 371, the passage speaks about the pebble that Martha sent Lieutenant Cross, "Lieutenant Cross found this romantic. But he wondered what her truest feelings were, exactly, and what she meant by separate-but-together." This whole scene reminded me of one of my favorite books and movies, "Dear John." It seems as though many love-military stories, encompass this scenarios of the person at war wondering how much the person at home really does love them. In both cases (Dear John and The Things They Carried), the men at war end up burning all the letters and pictures of the loved one. I found that ironic.
Words I was not familiar with:
Encyst: enclosed
Unencumbered: to free of burden
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