Symbolism of Light and Darkness in Dark's The Gloaming and Carver's Cathedral

In "The Gloaming" and "Cathedral" the symbolism of light and dark are important. The mother in "The Gloaming" comes to exist only for darkness as the nighttime enlightens her about her son's life. In "Cathedral," the narrator is brought from darkness into life by learning to empathize and understand. In the story "The Gloaming," Laird comes home to die of AIDS, and he and his mother spend this final time together. The days are so hot that he only comes out at nigh. They call this time the gloaming from a painting they had seen together. The son Laird thought it was gloomy but his mother told him it was beautiful because the "few moments of purple light made the whole world look like the Scottish highlands on a summer night" (3). This becomes symbolic of their relationship. They take this final time together to try and understand each other better, to try to capture closeness before Laird dies. His mother begins to live like him, sleeping a lot in the daytime, and begins to look forward to this time when the sun set, "tracking the time the sun would set" (5) This was the time the real world would begin. In other words, this was the time when they would just be together mother and son. He didn't look quite so gaunt in the dark, and maybe they could both pretend, if only for a little while, that he isn't dying. In the final part, when he gets really sick, he wakes in the daytime, but he realized "it was already dark" (12). This darkness symbolizes death. In fact, the light makes him look trapped. This is because he is dying. When he does die, the mother shifts into past tense, to give us a better view of his childhood and spends the last few pages talking about him as an infant. This is her way of dealing with the death of her son.

In "Cathedral" a blind man is coming to visit the wife of the narrator. She use to work for this blind man, and they were very close. Her husband doesn't understand this and is quite apprehensive about meeting a blind man since it is totally outside his realm of experience. He has no desire to learn new things and sees this blind man as nothing but a nuisance. When he meets Robert, the blind man, he doesn't act at all the way a blind man should according to the narrator. For example, he smokes and has a beard.

In "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver the point of view alternates between present and past tense to get a fuller picture of the narrator. He drinks and has a general lack of intimacy in his relationship with his wife. He is a man who is quite "in the dark" about a lot of things in his own life. He doesn't understand his wife at all and doesn't understand why this friendship is so important to her. However, after they smoke some pot and eat, they stay up together and a television show comes on about cathedrals. At Robert's prompting they begin to try and draw a cathedral together, since the narrator is unable to explain the concept to a blind man. Robert's hand over the narrator, they draw together. And Robert instructs the narrator to close his eyes and keep drawing. This is the moment of epiphany to both Robert and the narrator, the true moment where darkness turns into light. The narrator truly comes out of his cave of darkness and understands something from the perspective of the other person for once in his life.

In these stories, light and dark become symbols. In "The Gloaming," darkness actually comes to symbolize enlightenment between a mother and a son. In "Cathedral," the darkness of a late night also means enlightenment for both Robert and the narrator.