"River of Names" and "Cathedral"

Immediately after reading “River of Names” by Dorothy Allison I did some research on her background. This is because in the story there were mentions of places and things that I was familiar with. I found out that she was born in Greenville, SC. I am from there.

This story is about a lesbian lying in bed with her lover Jesse. She remembers all the horrible things that have happened in her past. She is from a very large family with lots of cousins, aunts and uncles. It seems to me that there are an exaggerated amount of things that have happened to her family. I picture her family as living in some really run down farm house out in the country. They are all drunks and always treating each other terribly. The parents do not take responsibility for instilling in kind of character into their children. It is a vicious cycle that cannot be broken. The narrator, the lesbian, has tried to get out and knows that her life choice will make no difference to her family. Being a lesbian is much better than what some of her relatives have turned out to be. We see this on page 5 “I come of an enormous family and I cannot tell half their stories. Somehow it was always made to seem they killed themselves: car wrecks, shotguns, dusty ropes, screaming, falling out of windows, things inside them. I am the point of the pyramid, sliding back under the weight of the ones who came after, and it does not matter that I am the lesbian, the one who will not have children.” To me it seems that the narrator is scared to have children. That if she gets married and has a normal relationship with a man that they will only continue the carnage that her family has started. From some research of Dorothy Allison I found that she was also a lesbian and I think that this story is very close to how her childhood went.

One thing that I wanted to comment on is that I come from a family of 6 children. And in no way does this story represent anything like my childhood. So I don’t think that there is a correlation between family size and dysfunction in the family. This failure in her family comes from lack of guidance and selfishness on the part of the parents.

“Cathedral” by Raymond Carver.

In this story the narrator’s wife has a blind friend that is coming to visit. The husband has never met this man before and is very unsettled about him coming to stay. Also he is unsure of his wife’s relationship to this blind man. To tell you the truth I kind of agree with this thinking. Not because of his blindness but because it is always weird to meet people from your significant other’s past that you know nothing about. On page 111 the narrator begins questioning his wife about this man. She becomes sort of defensive. “If you love me,” she said, “you can do this for me. If you don’t love me okay. But if you had a friend, any friend, and the friend came to visit, I’d make him feel comfortable.”

This shows that even before he has met him he already has a bad opinion about this man. This is something that I do sometimes. I make up my mind about someone and then later when I get to know them I actually enjoy being around them. That is what happened in this story. The husband and the blind man watch a television show about cathedrals. They have a moment where the narrator, husband, realizes that this blind man is very special is not someone to be scared of. They end up drawing a cathedral together as we find on page 122. “He (the blind man) found my hand, the hand with the pen. He closed his hand over my hand. “Go ahead, bub, draw,” he said. “Draw. You’ll see. I’ll follow along with you. It’ll be okay. Just begin now like I’m telling you. You’ll see. Draw,” the blind man said.” There is a real life lesson that we should learn to accept people different from us before we judge them without even knowing them.

Vocabulary:

“River of Names” page 10 hydrocephalic: A usually congenital condition in which an abnormal accumulation of fluid in the cerebral ventricles causes enlargement of the skull and compression of the brain, destroying much of the neural tissue.

“Cathedral” page 120 fresco: The art of painting on fresh, moist plaster with pigments dissolved in water.

“Cathedral” page 120 Lisbon: The capital and largest city of Portugal, in the western part of the country on the Tagus River estuary