cat in the rain

The usage of “iceberg method”

————cat in the rain

The short story “cat in the rain” was written by Ernest hemingway in the 1920s during the post-war period. He is one of the most famous American novelists, short story writers and essayists, who has a tremendous influnence on a wide range of writers after him in this field. His “iceberg method” makes most of his stories meaningful and impressive, “cat in the rain” is one of the best.

First of all, some of you may have a confusion about the conception of “iceberg method”, you may ask “what is iceberg method” and “what can it bring to a literary work?”. According to the initiate, “there is seven-eights of it underwater for every part that you show. Any thing you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg”.1 You can just have a sight of the one-eighths of the iceberg above the water, others are hiden under its surface. Though the author didn’t give you a clear expression, you can realize his ideas by intuition and his showing part.

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.2

The story of “cat in the rain” is very simple and concise: a couple of young

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E.heimingway

《Death in the Afternoon》Ernest Hemingway

American live in a italian native hotel. It is rain, the wife wants to take a cat in the rain into their room, while his husband shows his indifference to her and do nothing to help her. The woman thinks a lot until another cat is sent by the hotel keeper. This short story implies the way of people’s life in a long time. Hemingway cut off the regular introduction part, directly began the story and described the scence in front of the reader. There are only four characters in “cat in the rain”: wife, husband, hotelkeeper and maid, their appearance and inner world are unknown for us. Hemingway only gave us a few setences about the enviroment in the 1st paragraph. Even the most important part—conversation, which impulses the development of the story, are only several words. “so that many critics said hemingway’s story has a stlye of telegram”.3

We can see that this story is very simple and the description is concise. A few characters and a few conversations make this story. But if they will damnify the content of it? Hemingway will tell you that you’ve just seen a corner of the iceberg, you will find more under the water. This is the power of his iceberg method.

From the beginning, “there are only two Americans stopping at the hotel, they did not know any of the people they passed on their way to and from their home.”From this description of the circumstance of the American couple, we can feel that the couple have few friends in a foreign country, and people become indifferent to each other after the world war, they do not communicate with each other and you feel lonely this sort of phenomenon due to the gap among people. Then the author used

3

Baker, Carlos (1972). Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (4th ed.). Princeton University Press.

several words to illlusrtate the reaction to the wife’s desire to take the cat inside which shows the husband’s indifference to the woman. They are very polite to each other and we can not find the intimacy between them which is very popular and normal in a marriage relationship. After finding the cat disappeared, the wife feels very upset and goes back to the room. His husband just gives few reactions to her.

The woman wants to have a stable family and in some level, the cat is the woman herself. She can’t feel safe and she has a desire of love and respect. But her husband do not share her feelings and ideas, he only uses simple words to react. When the woman shows her intendency, her husband ignore it and even tells her to shut up. We can see this kind of ignorance when the woman says her opinoin about her hair style. Hemingway’s portray about the situation is simple but direct, but we can feel more than his words. Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker believed that as a writer of short stories Hemingway learned how to \"get the most from the least, how to prune language how to multiply intensities, and how to tell nothing but the truth in a way that allowed for telling more than the truth\".4

The hotel keeper here in this book is a quite clear comparison with the husband. It seems that the owner of the hotel owner treats the American wife so well. He bows to her when she passes the office and helps her find the cat. But actually they do not communicate with each other, and there is gap between them and what the hotel owner has done to her just increase the conflict between the wife and his husband. The description of the hotel keeper is not much but readers can have a brief

4

Baker, Carlos (1972). Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (4th ed.). Princeton University Press.

impression about him and feel his difference to husband.

In conclusion, the author portrays a simple story among the husband and his wife and the hotel owner as well as the maid to express the indifference among people and the lost feeling of people after the First World War. And the author does not tell us directly, but just mention some scenery and a few people’s behaviors to imply and let readers imagine the rest according to the specific background. In doing so, we can understand the profound meaning beneath words and know what the author wants to convey through his short story. Of the concept of omission uesd in this short story, Hemingway wrote in \"The Art of the Short Story\": \"You could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.\" By making invisible the structure of the story, he believed the author strengthened the piece of fiction and that the \"quality of a piece could be judged by the quality of the material the author eliminated.\" His style added to the aesthetic: using \"declarative sentences and direct representations of the visible world\" with simple and plain language, Hemingway became \"the most influential prose stylist in the twentieth century\".5

5

Meyers, Jeffrey (1985). Hemingway: A Biography. London: Macmillan