Reader's Response: "Cat in the Rain" by Ernest Hemingway(textbook pg687); "A Rose for Emily" by Faulkner(textbook pg 700)

In this blog, we are to analyze and summarize our readings from our textbook Literature for Compostition.


In Ernest Hemingway's "Cat in the Rain", I found myself bored and confused. The story seems to be about an American girl and her husband stopping at a hotel on a rainy night. While the American girl is looking out her window she spots a kitty and she wants to go down and get it. The husband seemingly does not budge to save the kitty and upon her going down to get it, she is stopped by the maid who seems baffled why she would be going down to get a cat from the rain. These people( maid and hotel-keeper) seem to be treating this lady as if she is royalty and this shows me that she seems to have money and it seems to be a nice hotel and not just some rundown place. After finding that the cat is gone, she returns to her room but she seems very spoiled because she is complaining about the things she likes and dislikes. She wanted a cat really bad and at the end the maid brings the cat up to the American lady, but it ends so abruptly that I do not understand what her reaction was and what her husbands reaction was to the cat being bought up to her. I would have predicted a better ending than that! To me this story seems a little pointless and I can not seem to analyze this story to my best ability.

In Faulkner's, "A Rose for Emily", and this is only my inferences and my own interpretations, I feel that Emily was something like the joke of the town and many people did not understand her. They said she stunk, that she was crazy and many other characteristics that led me to believe she was not very liked among the community. She seems to be wierd and would stay in her home for some time. My mind keeps wanting to compare her to Emily Dickinson's story and how she kept to herself and did not really mingle amongst other people, that is the kind of vibe I am getting from this story but not just because they have the same name but because of their tendecies to do awkward and odd things. She did not want anyone in her home and when people did come she stood at the door and talked to them. It seems like while people had their thoughts about her, the community still seemed to care and love her as if she was normal but still was incapable of being sane as if she was crazy. I find their caring to be wierd because they seem to think she was crazy but felt bad for her when her father passed. They also seemed to feel bad that she was lonely with just a negro by her side. In the room, was a man who had been there for obviously a long time and yet from the indentation on the pillow and her gray her, she had been laying with him, sleeping there apparently. This shows that Emily was capable of loving somebody. I was also confused by this reading and it took me a couple reads to actually understand it all.