on "cat in the rain"
... Paris, where due to the favorable rate of monetary exchange, it was possible to live comfortably on a writer's salary. It was here that his story "A Cat in the Rain" was written. This is an intriguing little gem of a story, one of relatively few in the Hemingway canon told from the point of view of a woman. Although the point of view is third-person omniscient, our sympathies as readers lie with the female protagonist, called only "the American wife." The story works its way through her consciousness as she spies a stray cat huddled under a dripping table outside their Paris hotel, and attempts to rescue it. Her husband, George, spends the entire story curled up in bed reading a book, paying little attention to his wife. Ernest Hemingway's distinctively economical style seems particularly well suited to the stage -- even though a heavy polemical agenda sunk his single venture into playwriting (The Fifth Column, 1939). Guided by what he called the "iceberg principle", he became famous for telling his stories through dialogue and detail but without the usual authorial commentary, leaving it to the reader to find meaning below the surface. The most free-standing are the short opening piece and the longer concluding one. "A Cat in the Rain" takes place in a Parisian hotel room, where a man and woman are physically ...