From bulls to marlins, when Hemingway uses animals in his fiction they are purposefully used to create richer characterization for his human characters. For example, in The Old Man and the Sea, the Marlin is used as an almost worthy antagonist to Santiago and Santiago even admits there is not much difference between him and his fish.
In Cat In The Rain, the animal is a cat and it is significant enough to the story and characters that it rates a mention in the title of this short story. The cat has a twofold meaning to the story and the American female traveling with her husband. First, the cat symbolizes how human beings are often faced with larger, more hostile forces than they can contend with on their own. Second, the cat symbolizes the situation of the women in her relationship. The women seeks love, comfort, companionship and nurturing from her husband which she does not receive. She, therefore, like the cat “was trying to make herself so compact that she would not be dripped on” (Hemingway 167).
The cat also has a third relevance to the story and that is that it acts as a surrogate child for the women. She wants “to have a kitty to sit on my lap and purr when I stroke her” (Hemingway 169). She wants this as much as she yearns for long hair, i.e., some unique aspect to her identity which a child might serve for her, “I want to pull my hair back tight and smooth and make a big knot at the back that I can feel” (Hemingway 169). Her husband, on the other hand, likes things the way they are. As he says in reference to her desire to change her hair, “I like it the way it is” (Hemingway 169).
Her husband does not want change as his wife does. He does not wish to fulfill her emotional or physical needs in the story, content to lie in bed and read his newspapers with complete disinterest. In fact, he is annoyed by her repeated obsession over the cat and her const
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