Hemingway “The cat in the rain”. Critical analysis.

Hemingway was one of the leaders of the modernist literary movement, which took place after World War I, a master of implicit detail. He experimented with language by trimming the often excessive language of the nineteenth century into a spare, hard-edged prose. Hemingway manages to catch the post-war mood of disillusionment and dissatisfaction by forging an enormous impression through the economy of his style and the "toughness" of attitude of mind.

Ernest Hemingway's short story "The Cat in the Rain" is, on the surface, a simple tale of an American couple in Italy. However, the reader soon realizes that this uncomplicated tale illuminates much deeper meanings. The main idea of this story is the idea of family routine and loneliness which we can define even from the very beginning. A lot of poetic details such as “the war monument”, “empty square”, words with the semantic field of rain and water (water, pools, sea, dripped, glisten, slipped back) imply loneliness. The author uses the foregrounded repetitions that enforce this feeling of abandonment, oppressiveness and inevitability. For example, we can see the word combination “the war monument”, which implies the idea of destruction, grief and loneliness itself, three times in one paragraph. The theme of the story is one can have illusions of a happy family being misunderstood and lonely in fact.

The action starts to develop when the wife who is the protagonist notices a cat in the rain that is a parallel character. The cat “crouched under one of the dripping green tables...trying to make herself so compact that she would not be dripped on". The situation implies that the cat feels far from convenient and so does the wife in her family life. The word “kitty” is the symbol of loneliness, which helps to reveal the nature of the protagonist, her desire to care and to be cared. This desire is the foundation of the main conflict of the story which is the inner conflict within the wife. Hemingway gives names neither to the wife nor to the cat generalizing women in American families, difficulties in marital relations. There is also the contrast between the notion of the united and extended Italian family and the American family where 2 people just live together.

The husband, George, is the antagonist in the story. From the very beginning he doesn’t seem to care of his wife, his speech is very laconic while his wife is explicit in the expression of her feelings (dialog p. 126). But in the end we understand, that he is not indifferent, he loves her. Foe example, George starts the conversation in the dialog on p. 127. Some elements of the text make us understand that not everything is so bad, namely George changes his position and seems to demonstrate his interest. But the American wife wants the demonstration of love, she is tired of routine, she needs a lot, but at the same time she cannot get what she wants even her little poor kitty that shows the repetition of the words “want”, “like”and “new”. The only way that the woman finds in relieving herself from this situation is through making reveries or complaining. The reveries are those of possessing a child. She wants to be a woman (“I get so tired of looking like a boy”).

The opposing character to the husband is the hotel owner. The author describes the relation between the wife and the hotel-keeper as an indication of her relations with the husband. The poetic details “old heavy face” and “big hands” are full of situational connotation and imply the lack of protection, support, tenderness and care. The syntactical parallel structures which are reinforced by the anaphoric repetition of the verb “like” and show the qualities she lacks in her husband. She feels inconvenient, no umbrella in the rain, no care, just the wall of misunderstanding, and the hotel owner provides her with that protection and attention, she feels “very small and at the same time very important”. This unusual opposition of the epithets “small” and “important” helps to understand the needs of this particular woman and women in general.

Another secondary character who is parallel to the wife is the maid. Her actions (“umbrella opened”, “holding the umbrella”) and speech mannerisms (“you must not get wet”)  make the contrast between the wife and her husband evident. And that gives us the idea of the conflict between them, which is the minor, external conflict of the story.

The dénouement takes place, when the maid brings “a big tortoise-shell cat” when “the light comes on in the square”(the implication of hope). Symbolically the hotel keeper fulfills the woman’s dream and gives her what she hoped to have. The woman's agitation and perplexity are calmed down but still the problem remains unsolved.