Cat in the Rain Analysis

This story is set in a small, coastal Italian village. This town may have been familiar to Hemingway, as he was stationed in Italy during World War I. The Great War happens to be tremendously prese...

You might think the narrative perspective of this story sounds very third person: the basic sentences and statements seem strictly factual, and we don't get a sense that the narrator has an opinion...

"Cat in the Rain" is the epitome of its genre. It is slim, thoughtfully written, and full of more suggestions than it has words. You might think of it like a sculpture, where each sentence is three...

You might be hard-pressed to find a more controlled writer than Hemingway. The word "control" generally implies that there is something that needs to be controlled, right? There's a conflict betwe...

Before he started writing fiction, Hemingway worked as a journalist in Michigan, and the lessons he learned at his newspaper job stood by him throughout his career. His stories don't include many a...

Ok, so there doesn't seem to be too much imagination behind this title, but that's when you know something important is going on. The characters' actions and dialogues in this short, short story do...

The ending in this story is pretty typical for a short story: a delicious, surprising twist. The wife and her husband seem to have reached the climax of their argument. She has all of these desire...

Hemingway's stories may be short, but honey, they sure ain't sweet—and they certainly aren't simple. At a grand total of three pages, "Cat in the Rain," is one of the shortest full prose pieces t...

VacayWho wants to spend their vacation stuck inside? The situation of the couple stuck in their room is both monotonous and restless. The description of the view from the window suggests that it's...

The lack of sexual tension between this couple is astounding, but it also explains why the padrone affects the American wife in such a significant way. That brief moment when he bows to her from h...

Hemingway's allusion to a "War Memorial" in the first paragraph is a pointed allusion to World War I. Memorials like these, dedicated to the young men from a particular town who died in battle, wer...