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Cat in the Rain

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Cat in the Rain
By E.Hemingway

The story under analysis is written by a well-known American writer of XX century Ernest Hemingway. One of his main topics was animals as symbols and we can see this tendency in the title of the story.
Cat in the Rain was written in the 1920’s. It is about an American couple who spends their holidays in a hotel in Italy. It is a rainy day and the American woman sees a cat on the street and she wants to protect it from the raindrops. When she goes out of the hotel and wants to get the cat, it has already gone. As wife returns to the hotel room, she starts a conversation with her husband George and tells him how much she wants to have a cat and a lot other things. Her husband is not interested at all. Later there is a knock on the door and a maid brings a cat for the American woman.
The text of the story is not homogeneous: it presents a piece of narration intercepted with dialogues, descriptions and open ending. It is also divided into several parts according to the change of the place of narration: in the room, in the hotel and outside
The general slant of the story is emotional, pathetic, depressive and tense. As the author was a war journalist and a representative of the lost generation.
Cat in the Rain contains several semantic fields. The semantic field of colour: bronze, blue, green; of nature: sea, palms, rain, cat; of emotions: liked, smiled, disappointed, laughed, feeling of being of supreme importance, tired; of water: sea, rain, wet, dripped, glisten.
A rigorous analysis of the vocabulary of the story clearly shows that the writer employs common words in his narration and in dialogues he puts into the character’s mouth slang words to make them true to life.
The main stylistic devices in this story are repetition (numerous repetitions of the words ‘rain’, ‘read’ and ‘like’) and symbolism. The author employs several

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