The Cat

Cats are super cute. There, we said it. All of you “dog people” out there can deny it all you want. You can say cats are stuck-up snobs or whatever, but you’re fooling yourself if you don’t think cats are really cute (as well as possibly being criminal masterminds). And guess what? We have YouTube’s 10 Cutest Cat Moments to prove it.

So why all the talk about cats? Are we just really big fans of 1980s Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals or something? Well, yes, but that’s not the point here. The reason we’re talking about cats is because the cat in Act 1 of Rhinoceros plays a pretty important symbolic role in the play. The cat symbolizes the coming destruction. Yes, that sounds a bit dramatic when talking about a cat, but it’s not overstating it.

When the first rhinoceros appears on the scene, it doesn’t really do much damage. It shakes some people up and knocks over some stuff, but everybody and everything comes out of the ordeal relatively unscathed. It’s easy to overlook the fact that this beast can destroy and kill pretty much anything that comes into its path if it wants to.

The second appearance of a rhino just minutes later is a different story. This time the Housewife’s cat gets trampled. No more mouse-chasing for this kitteh.

In case this particular feline has slipped your mind, recall that the Housewife and her cat enter at the very top of the show. As soon as the curtain rises in Ionesco’s writing of it, the Housewife and her cat are the first things we as an audience observe in this play. Once the cat is dead, we can no longer ignore the potential danger that the rhinoceroses pose.

Well, we can, and almost everyone does, but we shouldn’t.