An Analysis of Ernest Hemingway's "Cat in the Rain"

Hemingway’s Americans’ continual desire for more alienates them from the rest of society, proving their lack of understanding for the world. In “Cat in the Rain,” an American couple is vacationing in Italy. Instead of admiring the beauty of their surroundings, the Americans instead focus on irrelevant trivial pursuits, illustrating their greed. After going down to retrieve the cat, the wife is immediately attracted to the hotel owner, proving Americans ever-evolving want for new things: “She liked the way he wanted to serve her. [...] She liked his old, heavy face and big hands” (Hemingway 130). Instead of staying loyal to her husband, the American wife forgets he exists and moves on to the next best person she finds, showing the apathy Americans possess for what they already have. Additionally, the hotel owner is simply doing his job, and the American wife’s failure to realize this results from her greed, which severely clouds her judgement. The greed Americans possess is further proven with the American wife’s childish behavior throughout the story. When the wife cannot find the cat, she complains, “I wanted it so much [...] I don’t know why I wanted it so much” (130). Back in the hotel room, the wife demands to her husband that she “want[s] to pull [her] hair back,” and to “have a kitty to sit on [her] lap and purr when [she] stroke[s] her” (131). The

Smith, Paul. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co. 1989. Print.

Ernest Hemingway wrote A Farewell to Arms, a celebrated historical fiction, amidst a time of war and personal suffering. Hemingway believed at this time that “life is a tragedy that can only have one end” (Hemingway, VIII). He continues further, calling war a “constant, bullying, murderous, slovenly crime” (Hemingway, IX). Hemingway also suffered at home, in addition to his issues regarding the state of the world. His wife had just endured a difficult pregnancy and delivery, which contributed to the last bitter chapter of his story. Keeping in mind the tortured and surly mental state of Hemingway, it is difficult to swallow the idea that he would write a wholesome, well founded love story that attracts people. To some readers, A Farewell to Arms tells of a whirlwind romance between an ambulance driver and a nurse that is based on an unbreakable foundation of love, trust, magnetism, and compassion. Anxious modernists, like Trevor Dodman who are cited in Joel Armstrong’s nonfiction text, will come up with a remarkably different outlook on this tragedy. With aid from “‘A Powerful Beacon’ Love Illuminating Human Attachment in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms”, the loveless relationship between Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley will be seen as rushed, meaningless, and mentally destructive to the parties involved.

In Hemingway’s novel multiple characters fall in lost love. The characters think they are in love, but in the end they aren’t. Hemingway introduces us to multiple relationship and characters. Through these relationships the author shows the struggle of friendships and relationships and the connection of love through the generation is gone. The love they feels faded, friendships are lost and not reconnected. Lost love, in multiple ways is shown and expressed in the novel. In Hemingway’s novel love gets lost in many aspects.

Ernest Hemingway grasps the intimacy and authenticity of human relationships, in his book, “In Our Time.” The book consists of short stories following the lives of different individuals. Few of the short stories include The End of Something, Mr. and Mrs. Elliot, Cat in the Rain, and The Doctor and The Doctor’s Wife. Through these short stories, relationships between male and female characters, lack meaningful intimacy. There is a disconnect amongst these couples. Hemingway redefines intimacy and what it means. Intimacy goes beyond sex; it is a bond between individuals. He is depicting two forms of intimacy through his characters. One form of intimacy is emotional intimacy, which is portrayed in the male characters. The other form would be sexual intimacy. Thus, Hemingway is changing our perception of intimacy; it is not only found in male and female relationships, but also in friendships. The bond between the male characters is more meaningful and stronger than the female and male relationships.

One would ponder upon the narrator's consciousness that his misery would create an ability to find "joy" in having the sweet creature around again. Surprisingly, the author grows "disgusted and annoyed" by the cat's presence again, which gradually rises into "bitterness of hatred" and he looks upon the cat "with unutterable loathing" (325). The cat's excessive pertinacity of overly affectionate personality towards its master grows a repulsive reflex into the narrator such that he perceives the cat's "loathsome caress," its "odious presence" like a "breath of pestilence" rather than its loving personality and loyalty (325). "Evil thoughts bec[o]me my[his] soul intimates - the darkest and most evil of thoughts," which lead him to commit a brutal murder towards his own wife thus representing the destructive revelation of the plot (i.e., self-destruction in this particular story) (326).

The world of Ernest Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” exists through the mostly unemotional eyes of the character Nick. Stemming from his reactions and the suppression of some of his feelings, the reader gets a sense of how Nick is living in a temporary escape from society and his troubles in life. Despite the disaster that befell the town of Seney, this tale remains one of an optimistic ideal because of the various themes of survival and the continuation of life. Although Seney itself is a wasteland, the pine plain and the campsite could easily be seen as an Eden, lush with life and ripe with the survival of nature.

Shortly after, the family is about to set off for Florida. After a brief conversation, Bailey forbids his mother from bringing the cat along for the ride. Once again, the Author expresses her view of her self-absorbed, callous mother through the grandmother. Going against her son’s orders, she decides to bring the cat anyways, for fear it may miss her too much or, in a freak accident, asphyxiate itself on on the gas burners. An utterly selfish action for nothing more than getting what she wants, just because she wants it. This action would prove to be disastrous in the end, showing the self destructive behavior of a woman unfit to be called a “mother” by O’Connor.

To mirror the couple’s confusion of life verses death through abortion, Hemingway arranges words and phrases to establish the story indirectly. While most who visit Europe enjoy it, literature and movies

The period between World War I and World War II was a very turbulent time in America. Ernest Hemingway most represented this period with his unrestrained lifestyle. This lifestyle brought him many successes, but it eventually destroyed him in the end. His stories are read in classrooms across America, but his semi-autobiographical writings are horrible role models for the students who read them. Hemingway’s lifestyle greatly influenced his writings in many ways.

The cat to her is the symbol of her desperation to have a child -

“Big Two Hearted River”, a semi-autobiographical short story by Ernest Hemingway, is a story about the main character, Nick, returning to Big Two Hearted River in order to recover from his inner wounds. Nick Adams goes on a journey alone in nature for a therapeutic purpose as he suffers from PTSD. However, Hemingway purposely avoided any direct discussion regarding to Nick’s mental wounds. The absence of the discussion is contributed by Hemingway’s writing style, the Iceberg principle. Hemingway focuses explicitly on what occurs on the surface without mentioning actual theme. This indicates that the theme of self-healing cannot be uncovered by simply looking at the text itself. In order to comprehend the actual theme of the story, the character development of Nick must be examined. This is possible since Nick Adams is a recurring character of Hemingway’s stories. The two preceding stories of “Big Two Hearted River”, “Now I lay me” and “A Way you’ll Never Be”, directly discusses Nick’s suffering from shell-shock and how he comforts himself by returning to Big Two Hearted river in his mind. The two short stories will be analyzed and connected to “Big Two Hearted River” in the essay first. This will provide a strong understanding of Nick’s psyche and the reason behind his return to nature. Then, “Big Two Hearted River” the short story itself will be carefully analyzed.

Her husband is the source of her emotional despair. He leaves her drowning in a storm of indifference and lack of affection. When she goes back to the room she begins to look at herself in the mirror studying her profile feeling unwomanly with short hair. She feels this causes the lack of physical and emotional attention from her husband. When she tells him of all the things she desires, he merely tells her to "shut up." He really doesn’t care about her concerns. She doesn’t defend herself from her husband’s verbal abuse but rather begins to pout like a little girl saying, "I want a cat, I want a cat now. If I cant have long hair or any fun, I can have a cat."(pg57) Suggesting that her husband will not allow her to have long hair or any fun. She wants this cat so bad, in order to hold it, pet it, and love it, symbolizing what she wants physically, to be held and touched, and emotionally, to be loved and cared for.

Hemmingway refers to the characters as, “the wife” and “the husband.” He wants to generalize the characters. The wife wishes to be stereotypically feminine. In the story she has short hair and is “tired of looking like a boy,” when, she begins expressing feminine wishes and shows signs of wanting a stay-at-home lifestyle, something many women had in the twenties.

“Hemingway’s greatness is in his short stories, which rival any other master of the form”(Bloom 1). The Old Man and the Sea is the most popular of his later works (1). The themes represented in this book are religion (Gurko 13-14), heroism (Brenner 31-32), and character symbolism (28). These themes combine to create a book that won Hemingway a Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and contributed to his Nobel Prize for literature in 1954 (3).