Cat Person

Dialogue is crucial, as it lets readers assess Robert independently of Margot. Robert is filtered through Margot’s perceptions of and fantasies about him. However, Robert’s verbal interactions with Margot show the way he really is and how he views her. Much of his dialogue is very condescending and exploits her relative youth. Margot feels like she has to keep up with him. Their dialogue displays their power differential, even as Margot makes excuses for the patronizing things that Robert says—for example, how he makes fun of her for living in a dorm room even though he knows she goes to college. The story’s dialogue displays how his condescension is based on insecurity, which suggests why Robert pursues the much younger Margot instead of women his own age.

Margot continually characterizes Robert as bestial: She likens him to a horse or a bear. This is almost the reverse of personification or anthropomorphizing, in which a nonhuman animal or object is given human attributes. Margot characterizes Robert in this way because she believes she has the upper hand in the relationship. She adheres to the patriarchal “Lolita” trope, derived from Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita, which holds that a young, seductive woman is powerful. However, Margot fails to see that this in fact plays into misogyny. Her association of Robert with animal qualities also suggests the possibility of violence that lies beneath their interactions, especially once those interactions are private. When Margot enters Robert’s house, for example, she becomes, in effect, caged with an animal whose actions she can neither predict nor control.

Much of “Cat Person” is told with long sentences that take up the vast majority of expository paragraphs. These sentences are often broken up into much smaller clauses: “At first, she deflected this with another joke, because she really did have to study, but he said, ‘No, I’m serious, stop fooling around and come now,’ so she put on a jacket over her pajamas and met him at the 7-Eleven” (Paragraph 9). These sentences mirror Margot’s unfolding thoughts, and how she must constantly make and remake her understanding of Robert. Each new piece of information adds to the accumulation of her impression of Robert, as though she was molding him from clay. However, there is also a sense of inevitable progression: Margot can’t seem to stop her constant judgment and thoughts.

The story’s expository sentences are very close to Margot’s thoughts, going in and out of her stream of consciousness in a way that makes the narrator seem close to but separate from Margot. This writing style mirrors a stream of consciousness, which also reflects Margot’s belief that what has been put into motion cannot be stopped.