Al-Azhar university

Faculty of Languages & Translation

English Literature Department
First Year

"Cat in the rain"

Ernest Hemingway

Prepared By
Ahmed Magra Al-Niel Mohamed

Under the supervision of

Dr. Salah Al-Nefely

2012- 2013

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 "Cat in the rain"
Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was an American journalist, novelist, and short story
writer. Hemingway settled in Paris in the 1920s, where he became associated with a group
of expatriate American writers including Gertrude Stein. He attracted attention as a fiction
writer with the publication of two volumes of short stories, In Our Time and The Torrents of
Spring . By the late 1930s, his reputation was well established by the success of his novels .
Hemingway's productivity declined during the 1940s, but his career revived dramatically in
the 1950s with the publication of The Old Man and the Sea (1952).

His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction,
while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. He was
awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954. Basically his style is simple, direct and
somewhat plain. He developed a forceful prose style characterized by simple sentences and
few adverbs or adjectives. He wrote concise, vivid dialogue and exact description of places
and things.

In his Iceberg Theory, "If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about
he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will
have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity
of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who
omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing." He
said

Cat in the rain

Cat in the Rain" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway which was first published in
1925 as a part of the short story collection In Our Time. It is a story that has never been
given much critical acclaim. Scholarship has generally approached it as a story of "marital
dissatisfaction". The story was a tribute to Hadley, his wife, who was dealing with her first
year of marriage, the loneliness it entailed, and her deep desire for motherhood.

Plot
A young American couple is presented alone in a hotel room looking out on an empty
square. From the hotel window the wife sees a cat crouching under a rain-dripping garden

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table. She declares that she will go down and fetch the "poor kitty." The husband, lying on
the bed reading, offers to do it but does not rise. As she opens the door, she sees a man in a
rubber cape crossing the empty square in the rain. The maid then comes and holds a
protective umbrella over her, but when she gets to the table, she discovers that the cat is
gone. On her returning to her room, George only briefly diverts his eyes from the book.
When she resumes her position at the window and restlessly expresses her many wants,
including a cat, he tells her to shut up and find something to read. There suddenly is a
knock at the door, and the maid appears with a big tortoise-shell cat for the wife.

Theme

The themes of the story are Loneliness, isolation and the problems between the
couple . when one partner becomes dominant or repressive and the other is trying to
change and improve the situation. If they are aware of their problems they might be able to
save their marriage, but if they do not recognize that their relationship will become more
and more like the depressive weather in this short story, until there will be winter when
their love will die.

Analysis
Cat in the rain is a piece of fiction referring to the literature of interpretation. This story is
also a psychological one because the author investigates human characters and their
relationships. The story is told in the 3rd person narrative. The title of the story shows the
fact that the cat play an important role in the story. We can say that it is symbolic title. The
characters presented directly. The text of the story is not homogeneous, it is interrupted
with the elements of description and the characters' dialogues. The plot of the story is
meant to begin before the narration itself starts. There isn't any preface to the story, the
reader knows nothing about the couple's past. Author shows his characters in a certain
period of their lives.

Characters
There are a few main characters in this short story, "Cat in the Rain". The American
wife and her husband are two of these characters. The wife is a woman with strong
emotions who longs to be admired and loved, while the husband is not so emotional and
doesn't care to show any love to his wife or their relationship. The story is based on the stay
and also the love affair of the couple.

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 The cat plays a rather large role in this short story. The woman wants to rescue the
cat from the rain, but before she can get to it, the cat has disappeared from the green table
it was hiding under.

Also, two other main characters mentioned in this story are the hotel owner and the
maid. The owner stood tall and elder with full dignity. The American wife liked that about
him. The maid tried to help the American wife by escorting her outside with an umbrella. At
the end of the story, the maid comes to the couple's hotel room to deliver the cat to the
wife. The hotel owner had caught the cat and sent it to the wife .

literary Devices
In "Cat in the Rain", Hemingway uses a variety of literary techniques to produce a
sense of ambiguity in the reader. He starts by using "rain" to evoke feelings such as
melancholy and emptiness in the reader. He then uses techniques such as characterization,
and symbolisms to express feelings in the characters and to develop the text.

Characterization is used by Hemingway as a catalyst to ambiguity in“"Cat in the

Rain"”. An example of this, is the female character, described in two different ways:
American girl and American wife, "The American wife stood at the window" , "As the
American girl passed the office". The real name is not mentioned. When the character is
named as American wife, she is an introverted woman, which is ‘ stuck’ to her husband.
However, when she is named American girl, she manifests all her desires, like the following
quote shows: "I want to pull my hair back tight and smooth and make a big knot at the back
that I can feel"”she said. By doing this, he strengthen the ambiguity of the text.

Hemingway uses "Allegory" in the story, for example, He uses the cat to represents
emotions and love that the woman wants. The American wife represents loneliness and
sadness. The hotel keeper can represent the happiness and care for the woman. Rain
represents the life and the hotel represents alienation.

The rainy weather creates an atmosphere of loneliness and depression in the relation
between the wife and her husband. Ernest uses the word of " empty square" to strengthen
this atmosphere. Hemingway uses irony in the story, for example, when George warns his
wife "Don't get wet", he said. But he knows that she will get wet.

The rainy setting that prevails during the end of the description, along with a very
simple structure, invokes a tedious, monotonous and dull feeling in the reader. “The sea
broke in a long line in the rain and slipped back down the beach to come up and break
again in a long line in the rain. The mentioning of the sea makes the setting even emptier.
Hemingway also uses repetition here to reinforce the tedious feeling. He uses the changing
setting to create a sense of mystery in the text.

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The end of the story
This ending is both abrupt and ambiguous, and hinges on the mystery of the tortoise-
shell cat's identity. We do not know whether it is the "kitty" the wife spotted outside and so
do not know whether she will be pleased to get it. Confirmation of the common identity of
the cats would have opened certain interpretative possibilities, while excluding others. If
the wife's desire for the cat were viewed as compensatory for lack of marital fulfillment (as
indeed most critics see it), the ending might thus have served as an ironic crack at the
husband's lack of deference for his wife. If the big tortoise-shell animal is definitely not the
kitty she wants, the irony might turn against her unrealistic longings and irrational
discontent . It is doubtful whether the enigma of the cat's identity can be solved,
considering the wealth of contradictory indices. The critic needs different criteria for
explicating Hemingway's method. There is at the heart of the story not simply the mystery
of what will happen after the story ends.

A New York Times book reviewer comments on the plot of the very short story,
writing “that is absolutely all there is, yet a lifetime of discontent, of looking outside for
some unknown fulfillment is compressed into the offhand recital.

Commentary
The American wife expresses a desire for many things in this story. She tells her
husband that if she cannot have any fun, then she might as well have things that she wants.
In other words, this desire for material goods comes from an inability to acquire intangible
goods such as fun and affection. This lack of intimacy is not entirely her husband's fault, of
course. She also ignores his compliments.

What the American wife is saying is that she wants palpable pleasures, and what she
has is a husband reading in bed; the emotional distance between the couple is illustrated by
her husband's remark, "Oh, shut up and get something to read." The American wife does
not need something to read, she needs something to feel. It is significant that Hemingway
recognized what was going wrong in his marriage to Hadley; he even recognized his own
part in it; but he obviously felt powerless to change. It should come as no surprise that
within a few years, the Hemingways divorced.

References
 Jackson J. Benson. New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest
Hemingway. Duke University Press, 1990.
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 Scott Donaldson. The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway. Cambridge University
Press, 1996.
 Carlene Brennen. Hemingway's Cats .Pineapple Press Inc, 2011.