A Study Guide for Ernest Hemingway's "Cat in the Rain"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Ernest Hemingway's "Cat in the Rain," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jul 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535820509

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Cat in the Rain

Ernest Hemingway

1925

Introduction

Cat in the Rain is a short story by Ernest Hemingway, one of the most innovative and widely recognized American authors of the twentieth century. Hemingway wrote the story in 1924 while living with his first wife, Hadley, in France. It was first published in his 1925 debut collection, In Our Time. With this collection of short stories and vignettes, Hemingway changed the methods for writing and reading a short story more than any American author had before.

Cat in the Rain uses two of the major motifs in Hemingway's fiction: characters in a dissolving marriage and characters away from home or feeling out of place. Written with the abrupt sentence structure and ambiguous dialogue that defines Hemingway's style, Cat in the Rain is a story that demands to be solved like a riddle. Each sentence must be examined individually to gain an understanding of the whole structure. Written at a time when Hemingway's marriage to Hadley was disintegrating, the married characters in the story are suffering from an unseen and unacknowledged wedge between them. But like any couple trying to hide their disdain for each other, the problems between the couple shine through their veils of false contentment, and the setting—a hotel room on a rainy day—is perfect for the destruction of a marriage that cannot be maintained. Cat in the Rain is available in In Our Time as well as The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition (1987). Both of these collections can be found in their entirety online at Google Books.

Author Biography

Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. His father, Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, was a general-practice doctor, and his mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, was a housekeeper. He spent his entire childhood in Oak Park, and by the time he reached high school he was an avid boxer and the head of the school newspaper. After high school, Hemingway moved to Kansas City, where he worked as a journalist for the Kansas City Star. However, World War I was escalating in Europe at the time, and the news of the foreign affair attracted Hemingway's attention. In April 1918, Hemingway quit his job at the Kansas City Star and set sail for Europe. He joined the Italian army, where he worked as an ambulance driver on the front. On July 8, 1918, Hemingway was severely wounded when a bomb nearly destroyed his knee. After spending some time recuperating in Europe, Hemingway returned to America in 1919.

By this time, Hemingway's family