Comparative Analysis of Cathedral and Sonny’s Blues

An epiphany is a powerful literary tool that can show the similarities between seemingly opposite forces. In Raymond Carver’s Cathedral, a male protagonist stumbles through a dinner engagement with an old friend of his wife’s. His flaws stand in the way of truly understanding the complex social and moral worth of the wife’s friend. In James Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues, a similar epiphany strikes the male protagonist as he struggles to understand a relationship with his brother that has undergone a life of disagreement. The two stories share similar themes as the strong, close-minded male protagonists gain an objective understanding of a situation that a subjective approach kept them from reaching throughout their lives. How the two protagonists reach this objective understanding differs in important ways. Both authors make use of epiphany, however, to represent how easily a person can ignore important aspects of their life despite how close and seemingly obvious these aspects are.

Raymond Carver’s Cathedral is a short story that pits an unnamed male protagonist against the antagonist, an older blind friend of his wife. It is a social connection of two different personal worlds. The blind man befriended his wife years before the setting of the story when she worked as a disabled persons associate, reading to blind people. They formed a close bond and used each other to communicate their own difficult life-situations through letters and poems after the wife had moved away from the location in which the blind man lived. The protagonist is introduced as a close-minded, ego-centric male subject. He drinks, uses marijuana, and has a habit of making short-sided remarks about the world around him. It becomes evident that his wife gained so much from her relationship with the blind man because of the disconnect that the protagonist’s close-mindedness brought to their marriage. The antagonist recently lost his wife and is represented as a person in need. He is in need of emotional support, eats and drinks as if he hasn’t in some time, and is blind. The protagonist and the antagonist make an important connection at the end of the story as the protagonist attempts to explain a television depiction of a cathedral. He falls short in his explanation because of his lack of ability to accept the religious and moral principles that the cathedral stands for. The epiphany that comes is one of objective understanding. He attempts to help the blind man trace a cathedral on paper, and only grasps the epiphany when their hands touch and the protagonist realizes for the first time what the blind man truly experiences.

James Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues is a short story that revolves around an unnamed male protagonist’s relationship with his troubled brother, Sonny. The story opens as the protagonist learns of his brother’s arrest, the result of a heroin addiction. He is an algebra teacher, and quickly makes the association between his algebra students and the upbringing of his brother. The story follows a flashback that provides a depth of struggle as he and his brother rose from a difficult childhood into two very different lifestyles. It isn’t until the protagonist’s daughter dies that he reaches out to his imprisoned brother. The distance allows the two brothers to begin an ongoing dialogue that connects them for the first time in many years. The story highlights a conversation between the two brothers centered on Sonny’s life and how his struggle with heroin addiction gave him insights into the tragic beauties of life. Only when Sonny reveals these insights does the protagonist understand why music, specifically Sonny’s lifelong playing of the piano, was such an important anchor for the antagonist. The protagonist’s epiphany comes when he understands that Sonny’s internal struggle allowed him to create a sense of freedom from the emotional pain that hampers the human condition.

In each of these short stories the protagonist embodies an ego-centric male that is close-minded to aspects of life that are incredibly important to them. The protagonist in Cathedral shows a tendency towards substance abuse. Alcoholism is commonly used as grounds for close-mindedness, anger, and a selfish sense of awareness. The protagonist embodies these characteristics as he describes his wife’s relationship with her childhood sweetheart, a man that led her to attempt suicide because of the challenges of the relationship. Instead of showing an objective sense of understanding for this difficult event he belittles her therapeutic poem writing stating “I think it was her chief means of recreation” (Carver 2). The protagonist of Sonny’s Blues shares a similar ego-centric male personhood. While substance abuse is the focus of the antagonist, the protagonist is communicated as a high-standing member of society. He is an algebra teacher, he spent a good deal of his adulthood in the army, and his sense of family is that of a patriarch. While he may not be self-centered to the faults of the protagonist in Cathedral, these characteristics keep him from gaining an objective understanding of his brother’s struggles. The epiphanies that both men gain come, in some degree, from these basic characteristics.

While the basis of the epiphany for both protagonists is internal, it would not occur if it wasn’t for an external source. Cathedral follows the cognitive faults of a working class man. His substance abuse and lack of emotional consideration for his wife shows through in his treatment of the blind man. He cracks jokes about being blind, refuses to engage the man during dinner, and only begins to form meaningful communication with him after the wife has fallen asleep. The connection that the two make is forced upon him. The beauty that is represented in his attempt to describe the cathedral isn’t necessarily an internal want to help the man, instead it is a selfish need to side-step an awkward silence. It isn’t until he connects with the blind man physically that he gains his epiphany.

Similarly, the protagonist of Sonny’s Blues doesn’t gain an understanding of his brother’s struggles until he truly connects with him. Throughout the story the protagonist seems set in his personal ways until a significant emotional event pushes him to dive deeper into his relationship with Sonny. Sonny’s heroin addiction is depicted, first, as social mores understand heroin addiction: dirty, self-involved, and lazy. When Sonny begins to communicate the importance of the piano to his life the protagonist gains a new view that he understood to be tragedy, laziness, and self-consumption. Sonny’s angst is summed up when he states “You walk these streets, black and funky and cold, and there’s not really a living ass to talk to, and there’s nothing shaking, and there’s no way of getting out – that storm inside” (Baldwin 42). The protagonist gains his epiphany when he hears Sonny play a set of Blues music in a dark bar, Sonny’s true environment.

The role of the antagonist in each story is one of opposition to the protagonists’ preconception of the world around them. Extreme opposites make for important realizations, but only when the opposites meet. In Cathedral the protagonist openly prods the blind man’s situation, and he is represented as a morally ambiguous person with strong convictions. Similarly, the protagonist of Sonny’s Blues holds strong convictions, characteristics that have made him a successful man, but his ego-centric attitude closes him off to understanding the extreme opposite of his drug-addicted criminal of a brother. When each protagonist is forced into an understanding of their extreme opposite, they gain a powerful lesson that could have cured personal issues throughout their life. Vulnerability breeds the epiphany that each protagonist experiences. It is in a state of vulnerability that they gain this epiphany, and it comes when they understand the powerful role that vulnerability played in the antagonist’s life. By using these characteristics as the basis for the social disconnect witnessed in each protagonist, both authors show how easy it is to ignore the most important aspects of life.

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. "Sonny's Blues." The Jazz Fiction Anthology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. 17-48. Print.

Carver, Raymond. "Cathedral." Lanzbom: Word Rogues (2014): 1-14. Lanzbomicci Designs. Web. 18 Feb. 2014.