Realizations In

In the majority of stories that are written the characters or the narrator come to realize certain things throughout the story. Sometimes these things come as an epiphany and at other times they are a slow and gradual realization. In the short stories by Alice Walker and Raymond Carver we see both of these types of realizations. In "Everyday Use" by Alice Walker the narrator has an epiphany, a sudden realization of sorts, while in "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver the realization that the narrator has comes over an entire evening.

Raymond Carver's story is about a man who has a preconceived notion of what a blind man is supposed to be like, look like, and act like and eventually is able to overcome these notions and "see" from a different perspective. Carver explains through his story how many individuals feel about people who are different from themselves. He addresses the way that people feel about the disabled, they pity them, they pity the people that are around them, for example in "Cathedral" the narrator says, "What a pitiful life this woman [the blind man's wife] must have led." He had made the assumption that because someone was blind he must have been a burden on his wife and the people around him instead of looking at the actual man's character and how he may positively influence his peers.

Carver uses the voice of the narrator to travel through the misconceptions that the majority of people probably have to arrive at the end of the story at a place of understanding and enlightenment in a sense. His character reaches, over the period of the evening, an understanding of what it is to look past someone's outside image to the inner depths of what makes up a man. He in the beginning doesn't know how to act toward the blind man and is uncomfortable with his differences but reaches a point at the end of the evening where he is comfortable holding the man's hand and helping him draws a cathedral. This exemplifies the ability to change ones perspective and to grow from an experience that may have been frightening at first but turns out to be enlightening. When his character is told by the blind man at the end of the story to close his eyes and to draw he realizes what it is like to "see" things from the perspective of a man who has to base his life perspectives not on what the eyes see but from what the heart feels. When the narrator says, " I was inside my house. I knew that. But I didn't feel like I was inside anything." shows the reader that he has reached a point of enlightenment and grown from where he was in the beginning of the story.

Alice Walker's narrator, the mother, changes her perspective of the situation in a flash. Throughout the entire story the mother is tolerant of her daughter who rejects their heritage, and culture, and tries to suppress her roots, while feeling ashamed in a sense of her daughter who is meek and mild calling her, "a lame animal" and talking about her, "dopey hangdog look." This repression of anger at her daughter for being so mild and scared and her tolerance of her daughter who is selfish and haughty is obvious all throughout the story but at the end she has an epiphany and everything changes. " When I looked at her like that something just hit me