Cat in the Rain Isolation Quotes

"Only" is a pretty lonely word. It relates a feeling of solitude and seclusion, and it just so happens to be the third word in this story. Right off the bat, we get a sense of the isolation surrounding this unhappy couple.

What a pitiful, pitiful image. Whether you like cats or not, it's a little hard not to feel bad for this little one. This scene is crucial to the story because it becomes the image into which all the wife's feelings of isolation are centered. It all boils down to this little image of the isolated, drippy cat. Poor thing—we definitely want to rescue it too.

This sentence is a great example of the isolating effect of language. While the wife is the most blatantly isolated character in the story, the maid's inability to join in the wife's conversation is equally potent. Parli Italiano?

Sometimes "isolation" can be a good thing—as it is here. After being on the receiving end of the padrone's bow and sign of respect, the wife is given the feeling of being someone singular, someone worthy of a gesture. In this part, the lonely isolation she felt before is inverted from a negative force to something much more uplifting.

George's unbreakable focus on his book is one of the strongest forces of isolation in the story. The wife seems to know she's excluded from his attention, so it's almost as if she's talking to herself throughout the story. How unaware do you think George actually is of his wife? And to what extent might she want to be isolated from him?

Is it at all strange to you that the wife's fantasy is filled with only herself, things, and the cat? Notice that there are no other people present in her fantasyland. The bond that she imagines with the cat is touching indeed, but it makes us wonder—to what extent do other people cause us to feel more isolated rather than cure it?