It isn't often that you find a good short story. One that, in fewer lines than you believe it could have taken, makes your world tilt just a little bit. Not a lot, but enough that you have to sit back, rub your eyes, and think about something in a way you never had before. I have had the distinct pleasure of reading two such stories in one day. The stories themselves, like all short stories, seem to be completely different and unrelated upon first glance, but deeper thought reveals connections and similarities.
The first story was one of a poor, African American mother and her two daughters. They live in what many of us would call a hut, but larger, on a farm in the South. The mother is a sturdy, man-like woman with nearly no education, yet holds a great sense of fairness and kindness for her family and others. Her youngest daughter, Mattie, is a shy young woman with self-confidence issues that most likely stem from the mental and phsical scarring she recieved during a fire in the fmily's previous home. All the same, Mattie comes across as caring and self-sacrificing, though it is unsure whether the self-sacrificing is from her lack of confidence or a giving nature. Yet, in comparison, the eldest daughter, Dee, is nothing more than a self-absorbed brat who is more concerned about her status in the world than her family. When Dee returns to visit her mother and sister, she is only there to use them. She wishes to gather "artifacts" to represent her African heritage. It was so strange to me, because even though I too realized that Mattie and her mother were living in almost 2nd-world conditions, the fact in no way gave Dee the right to exploit them.
The second story titled Cathedral, by Raymond Carver, is written in a completely different style than the first story. It is written from the view point of a man whose wife has invited her friend, an old, blind man, to visit them. The husband, whose name you never find out, is unsure to the point of being against the blind man coming to their home. His idea of such a person is one that is created directly from hollywood and imagines the experience to be uncomfortable and unpleasant. This, I find, is similar to the first story. Not so much as parallel to the thoughts of a character, but to my own thoughts. In the beginning of the first short story, I imagined a small shack with a dirt yard, something like I had seen of the farms of poorer countries on television. Already, I had an image and an expectation for how the story would play out, much like the husband does. As Cathedral progresses, the husband discovers that his previous prediction was quite far from the mark. The visit goes well, only awkward in the very beginning, and the husband's preconceived notions are quickly tossed aside, some by choice and others by necessity.
This too is similar to my experience to the first story. The ending was so far from what I had expected that I read the last paragraph twice before accepting the truth. I think that these two stories, while so very different, both teach the same message (as all short stories seem to have one). The message is that one should always be open to new concepts and ideas, or else one might oneself in a situation like the husband, alone with a blind man and nothing but shattered preconceptions to go by.
