After graduating from high school in 1916, Hemingway immediately left for Kansas City to enlist in the Army, hoping to be sent overseas to fight in World War I. Unfortunately, minor eye damage incurred during his high school sports career was severe enough for the Army to turn him down. He got a job at the Kansas City Star as a reporter until he was able to convince a Red Cross ambulance unit to take him on as a driver, and at last he made it to the front in Europe. He was seriously wounded in Italy, and incurred nearly a dozen operations to restore complete function to his knee, which was now surmounted with an aluminum kneecap.

The older waiter, on the other hand, understand only too well what despair is. As he says to the younger waiter, "You have youth, confidence, and a job. You have everything" (Hemingway, 382). The old man, on the other hand, has nothing -- no one to go home to, nothing to look forward to, no pleasure left in life except the small comfort of being able to spend a little time in a clean, well-lighted place.

As Hemingway grew older, he became convinced he had lost his talent, and this, along with his failing health and vitality, led him to commit suicide at the age of sixty. It is clear from a sampling of his short stories that his concern with the meaning of life had been a consistent part of his work from the 1920s on, and his inability to live up to the demands of the hero he invented should not be read as a failure of his vision, but rather, an affirmation of his humanity.

After the war, he drifted for several years between Canada and the Midwest, where he met and married Hadley Richardson, a comfortably-wealthy young woman several years older than he. Immediately after their marriage, the couple moved to Paris, where due to the favorable rate of monetary exchange, it was possible to live comfortably on a writer's salary. The Toronto Star -- where Ernest had worked for a short time -- engaged him as their European correspondent. It was here that his story "A Cat in the Rain" was written.

It is not until his mother confronts him over breakfast about his future that he realizes that he cannot continue to live at home any more. His mother pressures him to get a job by arguing that "There are no idle hands in [God's] Kingdom," to which Harold significantly observes, "I'm not in His Kingdom" (Hemingway, 151). And he's not. The world he discovered during World War I had no hand of God in it. His mother then observes that all the other boys "just your age" are settling down and becoming "really a credit to the community". This hearkens back to the first paragraph of the story, in which Harold observes a picture of himself with his fraternity brothers, all sporting identical haircuts and collars. Harold is no longer like everybody else; he's not sure who he is, but he's sure of that.

Like Mrs. Krebs, Hemingway's own mother was extremely religious and completely incapable of comprehending her son; unlike Harold, Hemingway openly resented her. He did not stay home long after the war, so apparently like Harold, Hemingway concluded it was easier to just move on.

Roth, John K. American Diversity, American Identity. Henry Holt & Co., NY, 1995.

Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. Dalkey Archive edition, Normal, IL, 1997.

Finally, his mother asks whether he loves her. He replies quite truthfully that he does not. We know that this is because his entire worldview has been turned upside down by his traumatic experiences in the war, and the ability to genuinely love requires an emotional balance he does not have right now. But his mother does not understand this, because she cannot identify with

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2051
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)