Cathedral and Barn Burning (Sadie)

 Barn Burning is my favorite short story by Murakami. Reading Cathedral alongside it was really interesting, because the dynamic of the characters feels really similar, but I think ultimately the message of each work is different.

As we discussed in class, there are similarities in the stories themselves, but I think overall Cathedral hints at the husband coming to a greater understanding of Robert and wife by drawing the cathedral with Robert. By Robert making them draw together, he is helping him see something he cannot, so the husband becomes more connected to his wife. However I feel that Barn Burning is the opposite. The girlfriend is trying to show Boku her pantomime, which she states about the oranges she’ is miming you have to forget there isn’t one’, and her later boyfriend tells Boku about the barns he supposedly burns. The narrator keeps looking at was is there, as in, the five barns he’s charted around his home, and forgets ‘what isn’t there’, aka the girlfriend.

When Boku meets with the boyfriend again, the boyfriend hints that Boku was close in understanding what he’d meant when he talked about the barns. Boku had gone through all that effort to chart them out but forgot about what wasn’t there. I believe the boyfriend is hinting that he did, indeed, kill the girl. He mentions that she had few relatives and no friends, and that the boyfriend was ultimately a little jealous of Boku. He comes off as a bit of a sociopath.

Cathedral to me is about understanding, and Barn Burning to me is about failing to understand someone.