This "Iceberg theory" is evident in Hemingway’s short story "The Cat in the Rain": "Though Hemingway learned as a professional reporter how to report facts as they were, he felt that there was a limit to representing reality. This is what he conveys through Cat in the Rain."[11] The idea that there is "something below the surface" to this story is particularly evident in relation to the cat. The cat is not just a cat. Instead, as Professor of English Shigeo Kikuchi writes, the animal’s nature is shrouded in mystery: "The moderately distant location of the room and the two words suggestive of the cat’s size, have the effect of concealing from the reader the cat’s true size and sort [which makes] it impossible to identify the “cat in the rain.”[11] But what does the cat represent? One explanation that scholars have offered is that the cat is a physical manifestation of the wife’s desire for a child: “The cat stands for her need of a child.”[12]
Other examples of things being more than they appear abound throughout the story. In one line, Hemingway mentions: “A man in a rubber cape…crossing the empty square to the café.”[2] Although this character at first might seem innocuous, it was not Hemingway’s style to add meaningless interludes to his stories. Therefore some scholars have taken this character to represent a “rubber condom” which the use of “prevents her from becoming pregnant, which was her main dream.”[12]
Correction: The man in the raincoat was a symbol of double isolation protected from the rain by the coat and socially isolated by the empty square ... in heading for the cafe and social contact he resonated with her desire for a newly involved life through pregnancy and a baby.[citation needed]