It is Sunday morning and the sound of hundreds of people walking around the cathedral can be heard around the square. The cathedral is magnificent, rising about two hundred feet into the air with menacing gargoyles and marvelous stained glass windows. Cathedrals are primarily used as a divine symbol, but in the short story "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver, he uses the cathedral to represent the relationship between the narrator and his wife. In his story, Carver shows that the narrator is a very jealous and bitter person who often neglects his marriage and does not try to build a better relationship with his wife. Once the woman's blind friend Robert comes to visit, he gives the narrator a new way of viewing their marriage. This gives the narrator a chance to see inside himself, for the first time, what he missed in marriage. The narrator is a very jealous man and is not very happy that his wife's blind friend is coming to visit him. , “[a] blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to” (Carver). This shows how superficial the narrator is. Even though this blind man is a very close friend of the narrator's wife, the narrator is too jealous. He doesn't even try to form a relationship with his wife's friend, which is just the beginning of showing how dysfunctional the marriage is. Even though the narrator is supposed to love and try to get along with his friends, he doesn't even make the effort to try to accept that his friend is coming for a short visit. To further demonstrate how strained the narrator's relationship with his wife is, they argue about her friend coming to their house: “[i]f you love me,” she says, “you can do that In my opinion. If you don't like me, fine. But if you had a friend, any friend, and the friend in the middle of a sheet... who he really is and what his wife means to him by drawing this church. He knows that he has treated his wife poorly and neglected many aspects of her life, but since Robert helped him, the narrator can now truly see. To conclude, Carver uses the narrator's metaphorical blindness to describe how he neglects so many different aspects of his life, the most important being his marriage. The narrator ultimately learns to disregard the physical aspects of his marriage and other appearances because there is always a deeper meaning. Carver uses Robert as a guide, even though he is blind he can read people and uses his other senses to see them, how they truly want to be seen, not just by their physical appearance. Robert helps the narrator see the error of his ways, to save the couples marriage. Works Cited Raymond. "Cathedral". np, sd, Web. February 25 2014.