Having read this story previously, it was interesting to look at it through the lens of learning. I had never considered it from that angle before, but there is a lot going on in terms of different ways people learn, as well as the obstacles to learning that people encounter.

The narrator  has a number of difficulties in dealing with the presence of “This blind man, an old friend of [his] wife’s” in his home. One of his largest difficulties is his prior knowledge of Robert’s relationship with his wife, and his lack of knowledge relating to blind people.

His “idea of blindness came from the movies”, and not from any real-lifer experience. He believes that this gives him the information he needs to know what to expect of Robert, and “A blind man in my house was not something [he] was looked forward to.” When Robert arrives, his preconceptions are all rendered invalid, and he is forced to reconsider what being blind actually means

Another aspect of prior knowledge that interferes with the narrator’s ability to confront his wife’s blind friend is the prior knowledge of their relationship. In short, he is jealous. His knowledge of the intimate emotional nature of his wife’s friendship with Robert leads him to see the blind man as a threat to his own relationship with his wife. When she offered to play one of the tapes Robert sent, and they are interrupted before he can hear Robert’s opinion of him, he concludes that “Maybe it was just as well. I’d heard all I wanted to ..” He makes a false assumption that this intimate friend of his wife’s automatically dislikes or disapproves of him. The fact that his wife was previously married may also be playing into his insecurities here, but there seems to be a deeper issue of his own sense of self-worth at play.

He is reticent to confront these difficulties throughout the story, struggling to maintain even the aura of hospitality. It is only after he asks Robert a direct question that the narrator begins to consider things from Robert’s point of view. He realizes that Robert has no conception of what a cathedral is, and in struggling to explain it to him, is forced to confront his own limited abilities of describing such a building without using visual language.

When Robert directs him to draw a cathedral while he follows along, the narrator makes a connection, both physically and emotionally with the blind man. His preconceived notions of the blind as helpless and slightly pathetic are shattered, and he sees Robert instead as a fellow human being. His faulty prior knowledge proves to be the greatest obstacle to his ability to learn. It is Robert’s ability to think and learn in a way outside the narrator’s experience that allows the narrator to finally be able to learn as well. In closing his eyes at the end of the story, he attempts to experience, if ever so briefly, what being blind is like. In doing so, he accepts that there are things to be learned from Robert, this blind man who he at first wanted nothing to do with.