Reading Raymond Carver's short story of the Cathedral you will notice the literary devices used in the story. By analyzing the story comprehensively, you understand the themes, motifs, metaphors, and overall point of the piece. This leaves the reader with an appreciation of the story and a feeling of complete satisfaction. Carver tells the first-person story of a narrator who is married to his wife. Problems arise when she wants a friend of hers, a blind old man, to come visit her for a while because his wife has died. The narrator's wife worked for the blind man in Seattle when the couple was financially insecure and needed extra money. The setting is important here, because Seattle is associated with rain, and rain symbolically represents purification or change. This alludes to the drastic change in the narrator at the end of the story. The wife and the blind man remained in contact over the years by exchanging tape recordings of their voices which the narrator describes as his wife's "chief means or amusement" (p. 581). The narrator does not move in chronological order, on the contrary, but uses small flashbacks to tell his point of view, up to the actual visit of the blind man where he then tells the story in the present tense. This makes it seem like the author is actually telling the story himself, reflecting on past events in his life when necessary. Its tone, however, is cynical, crude and humorous which pervades the entire story. Word choice and sentences are constructed with simple, realistic words, giving the reader the feeling that the author is really telling them the story. The narrator is prejudiced against the blind from the beginning. For example, she stereotypes all blind people as thinking that they... middle of paper... first time for everything." However, because of the way she "inhaled" and "held the smoke", the narrator believes of “doing it since he was nine” (pg. 506).This alludes to Robert's childhood, another thing he and the narrator share.So, when analyzing the story, one can conclude some parallel themes across the pages . First, in the end of the work there is a theme of unity and trust, supported by the image of the cathedral, which is, above all, the concept of equality between people theme within this story The narrator starts out as a biased idiot, to which he doesn't like all people who are not like him. He is also sometimes rude to his wife. Ironically, it takes a blind man to change who can literally see to drive away prejudice and teach him that all men are created equal.