Cat in the Rain and Hills Like White Elephants

Ernest Hemingway has a talent for writing stories that captivate and test his readers’ imagination. He is famously known for writing in, what he calls, the Iceberg Technique. In other words, Hemingway was a simplistic author giving his readers only the “tip of the iceberg”, and leaving their minds to create meaning behind specific words while he just guides us with his stories dialogue, simple imagery, and symbols. In order to fully understand his stories, readers must piece the symbols and dialogue together to create the bigger picture! This was a common theme found in “Cat in the Rain” and “Hills Like White Elephants.”
In the short story, “Cat in the Rain”, Ernest Hemingway sets the scene of his fiction in a hotel room in Italy on a rainy day. When I first began reading this story I was rather bothered by the American wife nagging to her husband about a street cat stuck in the rain, while her husband was preoccupied reading a book.   For example, when the wife says, “I want it to be spring and I want to brush my hair out in front of a mirror and I want a kitty and I want some new clothes” it sounds like she is a materialistic American that has a never-ending list of wants and needs.     However, as I kept reading the story I realize that the sense of romance was completely absent between this husband and wife. One would expect an expression of love between a married couple while they’re away on a trip in Italy, especially since they are stuck indoors due to the bad weather. That’s when it struck me that Hemingway is trying to illustrate how a wife starves for attention and love in her failing marriage. And, in actuality, the short story isn’t really about the cat in the rain at all, but instead it is about the deteriorating marriage.
Many people that read “Hills Like White Elephants” for the first time may think they just read a story about a young couple waiting at a train station. The entire story is based on the conversation between the man and women. So...