Robert and the narrator's wife are very close friends. Ever since she met him when she responded to an ad in the paper that called for someone to read to a blind man, they have been close, and they confide in each other. Their friendship is evident throughout the story as they have a good time together at dinner, despite the husband's grouchiness. Both of them are sensitive and open, both in the narrator's recollections of their early friendship and in his description of their behavior at dinner. So, those aspects of their personalities don't change, and we don't see either the wife or Robert talking about changing their minds about something, or seeing something important in a different way.

But we do see the narrator change his mind about something important. That means he's the dynamic one, not the static one, and it's why the story is really about him. 

At the beginning, he's bothered by the fact that his wife's friend is blind and has a very unwelcoming attitude toward Robert:

"My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed. Sometimes they were led by seeing-eye dogs. A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to."

But then the three of them share the meal together, and they smoke together and watch television. The narrator starts to realize that the blindness isn't that important, that Robert is just a person he can connect with, like any other human. And when Robert and the narrator draw a cathedral together, that experience cements the narrator's change of heart:

"So we kept on with it. His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now. ... I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything."

Although the narrator doesn't come right out and say "I am more accepting and understanding toward blind people now, not like I was before," we can still tell that his transformation is complete because he's hanging out with Robert, doing something meaningful and enjoyable with him, and making physical contact with him as well.

In contrast, the static characters (the wife and Robert) don't experience that kind of spiritual growth. They are just the people who happened to be involved in the narrator's experience.

The narrator of Cathedral is a bitter, cynical, logical, hardened, whiney man.  He views most things in life through a very non-impressed, sardonic lens. Nothing impressed him.  Of his wife's ex, he writes, "Her officer—why should he have a name?"  Of his wife's poems:  "I didn't think much of the poem."  Of the blind man's tragic loss of his wife:  "Pathetic".  Of his wife's attempted suicide:  "But instead of dying, she got sick."  Now, all of those traits don't really paint a very good picture. He is pretty narrow-minded, and not good at seeing things from someone else's perspective.  Overall, he is a guy who is kind-of struggling to find happiness and meaning in life, but, also, I would say, is just pretty non-impressionable.  We all know people who aren't easily touched, moved or impressed, and that seems to fit this narrator pretty well.

There are some good traits, that we see more at the end--he is kind to guests (he spends quite a bit of time with Robert), laid-back (they chill for hours), and in the end, more open-minded.  He has an experience that teaches him to think outside of his own narrow-minded perspective, and it really moves him.  He states in his rather straightfoward way, of his experience drawing cathedrals with his eyes closed, "It was like nothing else in my life up to now."  For him, this is a huge statement, considering how stoic and hard he was before this point.

I hope that these thoughts help a bit; good luck!

In his story “Cathedral,” Raymond Carver uses adjectives and adverbs in various ways to depict the narrator’s character.  Some of those ways include the following:

• Many of the adverbs are simple and plain, as if to imply that the narrator himself has a simple, plain, straightforward personality. Such adverbs include the following: “slowly,” “usually,” “really,” finally,” “only,” “nearly,” “loudly,” “slowly,”  “recently,” “absolutely,” “hardly,” “simply,” “mostly,” and “really.”  Some of these adverbs are used more than once, but perhaps the most remarkable thing about them is that they are so unremarkable. Also striking is that there are so relatively few of them. Both facts suggest that the narrator of the story is not much given to emphasis or embellishment or calling attention to himself. He is a plain-spoken man, indeed a man of relatively few words. His vocabulary is simple, direct, and unadorned. In telling his story, he doesn’t seem to be trying to impress anyone. Very few of the adverbs he uses carry any specially impact; they are the kinds of adverbs anyone might use in describing almost anything.
• Occasionally the narrator uses an adverb that is not really a grammatically correct adverb, as when he says that he is not “doing so good.” These grammatical errors again contribute to our sense of him as plainspoken, unpretentious, and perhaps not especially well educated.
• Many of the adjectives used by the narrator are also plain, uncomplicated, and direct, including such words as “long,” “slow,” “famous,” “great,” “interior,” “tall,” “closed.” This is true even at the very end of the tale.
• Of all the adjectives used in the story, one of the most significant in terms of the theme and meaning of the work is the word “lonely” – a word that seems to apply, if anything, even more to the narrator than to the blind man, although we might have expected the latter to be the lonelier of the two.
• Given all the emphasis on the plainness and simplicity of the story's adjectives and adverbs, it hardly seems surprising that the story's very last sentence is as follows:

"It's really something, I said." [emphasis added]