the rain summary essay

A Summary and Analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Cat in the Rain’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Cat in the Rain’ is a very short story by Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), published in his early 1925 collection In Our Time . Hemingway wrote ‘Cat in the Rain’ for his wife Hadley while they were living in Paris. She wanted to get a cat, but he said they were too poor.

‘Cat in the Rain’ was supposedly inspired by a specific event in 1923 when, while staying at the home of Ezra Pound (a famous cat-lover) in Rapallo, Italy, Hadley befriended a stray kitten. You can read the story here before proceeding to our summary and analysis below.

‘Cat in the Rain’: plot summary

An American couple are staying at a hotel in Italy. It is raining heavily one day, and the wife, looking out of their hotel room window, spies a cat under one of the tables outside, trying to shelter from the rain.

She wants to go and get the cat and bring her (the cat is specifically gendered as female) indoors. Her husband, George, sits on the bed, reading, and offers to go and fetch it, but the wife says she will go.

She goes downstairs and talks to the Italian hotel owner, whom she likes. Stepping outside, she is about to go looking for the cat when the maid who looks after their hotel room appears with an umbrella, telling her she mustn’t get wet.

The wife fails to find the cat, and returns up to her hotel room, disappointed. She tells her husband that she wants a cat, as well as other things: she wants spring to arrive, and she wants some new clothes. But George is engrossed in his book and isn’t listening.

Then, at the end of the story, the maid knocks on the door and when she enters, she is holding a large tortoiseshell cat in her arms. She tells them that the hotel-owner told her to bring the cat up for the wife.

‘Cat in the Rain’: analysis

In keeping with Ernest Hemingway’s signature style, ‘Cat in the Rain’ is written in spare, clear prose, using short sentences and plain dialogue. This is a trademark feature of Hemingway’s style in his short stories and novels.

Hemingway’s stories often seem direct and matter-of-fact, as though they simply mean whatever they say, but there is, in fact, symbolic resonance to many of the ordinary and everyday details he builds his stories around.

The cat in the rain is not just a cat: she clearly symbolises something more to the wife, who wishes to rescue her from the rain and, in doing so, rescue a part of herself. She, too, wants to escape the rain, as her reference to spring (which hasn’t yet arrived) towards the end of the story demonstrates.

In other words, we might analyse or interpret the cat as a site of desire for the wife: the cat represents desire itself, all her wants, becoming a tangible, physical manifestation of her desire. We want what we can’t have, of course: Jacques Lacan’s work on desire argues as much, and in English the word ‘want’ denotes both a desire and a lack (i.e., you want an ice cream but if you fall short of some standard you are said to have been found wanting ).

Of course, the wife’s initial failure to find the cat when she goes outside is also, we might say, significant: having seen what she wants, the object of desire, she then fails to attain it.

The maid’s role in the story is also significant in this connection. There is an intriguing relationship between the three female characters of the maid, the wife, and the cat. The wife’s actions are motivated by a desire to shelter the poor cat from the harsh rain, but also because, as she acknowledges, she wants a cat (among other things).

The maid, meanwhile, brings the wife an umbrella so she won’t get wet. So there is an intriguing echo of the wife’s actions (trying to stop the cat from getting wet) in the maid’s (trying to stop the wife from getting wet).

‘Cat in the Rain’, in short, is not just about a cat. The cat can be taken at face value and surface level as ‘just’ a cat, and the events of the story as being a minor snapshot into one hour’s events in the lives of an American couple living in 1920s Italy. But since when in our own lives do events simply happen without having wider implications? Many things we do are motivated by other desires, drives, wants, fears, anxieties.

This is especially true of American culture, we might say, which – in Hemingway’s time as much as in ours – has often been driven by desire for material objects: a new car, a bigger house, the latest fashionable clothes, and so on. The cat cannot be separated from this mentality: it embodies it. Although the wife begins by wanting the ‘cat in the rain’, she later expresses the wish to have a cat: any cat will do. She wants a pet.

This reveals that although helping an animal in distress (the cat trying to avoid the rain under the table) may have formed part of her initial desire to rescue the animal, her actions were also driven by more selfish and materialistic desires.

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7 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Cat in the Rain’”

Why is it important to know the cat “is specifically gendered as female?”

I think Hemingway is linking the (female) cat to the female protagonist, and, to a lesser extent, to the maid. The dynamic between these three female characters contains some patterning and overlap, e.g., the maid helping the woman, the woman helping the cat.

I read this story before and the beauty of the story really puzzled me. I mean it has puzzled me until today. I really like it but I don’t know why I like it since it sounds so plain and unadorned. LOL.

It’s one of the things I love about Hemingway. You can take the story at face value and enjoy it, or probe for subtle hidden meanings in the very plain, direct style. And never be sure which is the way he intended to be read!

I think that the women wanted the cat because she felt left out by her husband so she tought that the cat will maybe give her some company unlike her husband who was not caring at all even that they were on vacation

hush now, you’re simply incorrect.

how? isn’t it like that?

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“Cat in the Rain” by Ernest Hemingway: A Critical Analysis

“Cat in the Rain” by Ernest Hemingway was first published in 1925 in the short story collection “In Our Time”.

Introduction: “Cat in the Rain” by Ernest Hemingway

Table of Contents

“Cat in the Rain” by Ernest Hemingway, first published in 1925 in the short story collection “In Our Time,” is notable for its simple and precise use of language to convey a wide range of complex emotions. “Cat in the Rain” is a short story about an American couple on vacation in Italy, and it received acclaim from many notable authors of the period, including Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Main Events in “Cat in the Rain” by Ernest Hemingway

• American Tourists in Italy Two American tourists, a husband and wife, are staying at a hotel in an unnamed Italian town. They are the only Americans at the hotel and do not know anyone else.
• The Wife Sees a Cat in the Rain The wife sees a cat crouched under a table outside their window, trying to stay dry in the rain. She feels sorry for the cat and decides to go downstairs to get it.
• Friendly Hotel Staff The hotel owner and the maid are friendly and courteous to the wife. She likes their dignity and seriousness, and the way they take their jobs seriously.
• Disappointment Outside When she goes outside, the cat is gone, and she is disappointed. The maid tries to comfort her, but the wife is still upset.
• Unresponsive Husband Back in their room, the wife talks to her husband, George, about her desire for a cat and other things she wants, like long hair and nice clothes. However, George is not very responsive and is more interested in reading his book.
• Feeling Small and Tight The wife feels small and tight inside, and her desires and frustrations are still unaddressed. She is looking for something more in her life, but her husband is not providing it.
• The Maid’s Kindness The maid tries to comfort the wife and shows kindness towards her. She even offers her an umbrella to keep her dry in the rain.
• Desire for a Cat The wife’s desire for a cat represents her desire for something more in her life. She wants something to care for and love, but her husband is not providing it.
• Fulfillment of Desire The maid arrives with a big tortoiseshell cat, which the wife is happy to receive. Her desire for a cat is finally fulfilled, but her other desires and frustrations are still unaddressed.
• Unresolved Frustrations The story ends with the wife’s desire for a cat fulfilled, but her other desires and frustrations still unaddressed. She is still looking for something more in her life, and her husband is still not providing it.

Literary Devices in “Cat in the Rain” by Ernest Hemingway

Characterization in “Cat in the Rain” by Ernest Hemingway

Major character: american wife.

• Example: Hemingway directly characterizes her by describing her concern for the cat caught in the rain: “The poor kitty out trying to keep dry under a table.”
• Example: Through her dialogue and actions, the reader understands her emotional state and desires: “I wanted it so much… It isn’t any fun to be a poor kitty out in the rain.”

Minor Character: Hotel Owner

• Example: Hemingway directly characterizes him by describing the American wife’s admiration for him: “She liked his dignity… She liked his old, heavy face and big hands.”
• Example: Through his respectful gestures and demeanor, the reader infers his professionalism and hospitality: “He stood up and bowed to her as she passed the office… She liked the way he felt about being a hotelkeeper.”

Major Themes in “Cat in the Rain” by Ernest Hemingway

• Theme 1: Alienation and Isolation The story highlights the emotional disconnection between the American couple, George and his wife. They are physically together but mentally distant, exemplified by George’s indifference to his wife’s desires and feelings. The wife’s attempt to connect with the cat and her frustration when it’s gone underscore her sense of loneliness. The rain and empty streets outside their hotel room reinforce their isolation, emphasizing the emotional void between them.
• Theme 2: Desire for Human Connection The wife’s longing for a cat represents her deeper desire for human connection and companionship. She craves something to care for and love, which George fails to provide. Her fascination with the cat and her disappointment when it’s gone illustrate her yearning for a meaningful relationship. The story suggests that people seek connections with others, even if it’s with an animal, to alleviate their emotional emptiness.
• Theme 3: Disillusionment and Frustration The wife’s experiences throughout the story convey a sense of disillusionment and frustration. She’s disappointed by the cat’s absence, George’s indifference, and the unfulfilled desires she expresses. Her frustration is palpable when she says, “I want a cat. I want a kitty.” This repetition emphasizes her desperation for something to fill the emotional void in her life. The story portrays the consequences of unmet desires and the emotional toll of a loveless relationship.
• Theme 4: The Search for Meaning The story explores the human quest for meaning and purpose. The wife’s desires and frustrations symbolize her search for something more in life. She’s drawn to the cat, which represents comfort, companionship, and a sense of purpose. George’s detachment and the couple’s isolation suggest a lack of meaning in their relationship. The story implies that people seek meaning and connection to overcome their emotional emptiness and find fulfillment.

Writing Style in “Cat in the Rain” by Ernest Hemingway

• Example: “There were only two Americans stopping at the hotel.” (first sentence)
• Hemingway uses short, straightforward sentences to convey a sense of simplicity and clarity.
• Example: “The room was on the second floor facing the sea.” (no elaborate description of the room)
• Hemingway provides only essential details, leaving much to the reader’s imagination.
• Example: “The wife was looking out of the window. It was quite dark now and still raining in the palm trees.” (no dramatic description of the storm)
• Hemingway downplays emotions and descriptions to create a sense of restraint and subtlety.
• Example: The wife’s desire for a cat is not explicitly stated, but implied through her actions and dialogue.
• Hemingway suggests more than he states, leaving readers to infer meanings and emotions.
• Example: The wife repeats “I want a cat” twice, emphasizing her desire.
• Hemingway uses repetition to convey intensity, frustration, or obsession.
• Example: The cat represents companionship, comfort, and the wife’s desire for human connection.
• Hemingway employs symbols to convey deeper meanings and themes.
• Example: The story focuses on the wife’s actions (looking out the window, going downstairs) and her dialogue with George.
• Hemingway prioritizes action and dialogue over narration to create a sense of immediacy and intimacy.
• Example: No poetic descriptions of nature or emotions.
• Hemingway avoids ornate language to create a sense of starkness and realism.

Literary Theories and Interpretation of “Cat in the Rain” by Ernest Hemingway

Topics, Questions and Thesis Statements about “Cat in the Rain” by Ernest Hemingway

Short Questions/Answers about/on “Cat in the Rain” by Ernest Hemingway

• Question 1: How does Hemingway use the setting to reflect the characters’ emotional states?
• Answer: Hemingway uses the rain-soaked landscape to mirror the emotional desolation of the American couple. The “empty square” and “dark” room symbolize their emotional emptiness, while the “rain dripping from the palm trees” creates a sense of melancholy. The setting reinforces the couple’s disconnection and the wife’s longing for human connection, exemplified by her desire for a cat.
• Question 2: What role does the cat play in the story, and what does it symbolize?
• Answer: The cat represents companionship, comfort, and the wife’s deep-seated desire for human connection. Her fixation on the cat signifies her emotional isolation and yearning for something to care for and love. The cat’s absence underscores her sense of loneliness, while its eventual arrival offers a glimmer of hope for connection.
• Question 3: How does Hemingway’s writing style contribute to the story’s themes and tone?
• Answer: Hemingway’s sparse, direct language and use of understatement create a sense of restraint and subtlety, mirroring the couple’s emotional suppression. The iceberg principle, where more is implied than stated, adds to the story’s emotional depth. The focus on action and dialogue over narration creates an intimate, immediate tone, drawing readers into the characters’ emotional struggles.
• Question 4: What does the story suggest about the human need for connection and companionship?
• Answer: The story highlights the human desire for connection and companionship, underscoring the emotional toll of isolation. The wife’s desperation for a cat and her frustration with George’s indifference illustrate the consequences of unmet emotional needs. The story implies that people seek connections with others, even if it’s with an animal, to alleviate their emotional emptiness and find meaning.

Literary Works Similar to “Cat in the Rain” by Ernest Hemingway

• The Old Man and the Sea : This novel by Ernest Hemingway follows an aging fisherman, Santiago, who goes out to sea and catches a giant marlin. The story explores themes of isolation, perseverance, and the human struggle against nature.
• The Sun Also Rises : This novel by Ernest Hemingway follows a group of American and British expats living in Paris and Spain in the 1920s. The story explores themes of disillusionment, moral bankruptcy, and the search for meaning in a post-World War I world.
• A Moveable Feast : This memoir by Ernest Hemingway is a nostalgic and introspective account of his time as a young writer in Paris in the 1920s. The story explores themes of writing, love, and the human experience.
• “ The Yellow Wallpaper “: This short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman follows a woman who is confined to a room by her husband and descends into madness. The story explores themes of isolation, oppression, and the search for freedom and autonomy.
• “A Good Man is Hard to Find”: This short story by Flannery O’Connor follows a family on a road trip who encounter a criminal on the run. The story explores themes of morality, family, and the American South.

Suggested Readings about/on “Cat in the Rain” by Ernest Hemingway

• Lodge, David. “Analysis and Interpretation of the Realist Text: A Pluralistic Approach to Ernest Hemingway’s” Cat in the Rain”.” Poetics Today 1.4 (1980): 5-22.
• Carter, Ronald. “Style and interpretation in Hemingway’s ‘Cat in the rain’.” The Language and Literature Reader . Routledge, 2020. 96-108.
• Bennett, Warren. “The Poor Kitty and the Padrone and the Tortoise-shell Cat in’Cat in the Rain.” Hemingway Review 8.1 (1988): 26-36.
• Holmesland, Oddvar. “Structuralism and interpretation: Ernest Hemingway’s ‘cat in the rain’.” (1986): 221-233.
• Barton, Edwin J. “The story as it should be: epistemological uncertainty in Hemingway’s” Cat in the Rain.”(Ernest Hemingway).” The Hemingway Review 14.1 (1994): 72-79.
• Felty, Darren. “Spatial Confinement in Hemingway’s” Cat in the Rain”.” Studies in Short Fiction 34.3 (1997): 363-363.
• Breuer, Horst. “Past and Present in “Cat in the Rain” and “Old Man at the Bridge”.” Journal of the Short Story in English. Les Cahiers de la nouvelle 49 (2007): 99-108.
• https://biblioklept.org/2014/02/11/cat-in-the-rain-ernest-hemingway/
• https://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR1904R23.pdf

Representative Quotations from “Cat in the Rain” by Ernest Hemingway

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The Literary Companion

Discover the Artistry Within: Your Journey through Poems, Short Stories, and Novels

Rain: Analysis and Poetic Devices

Edward Thomas

About The Poet: Edward Thomas

When and where was rain by edward thomas written, vocabulary and line-by-line analysis of the poem.

If you find the article useful, I highly recommend checking out Rain and other available guides . Your support not only encourages me to continue writing well-researched articles but also contributes to the development of a better website. Thank you for being part of this journey! 📚✨

Rain by Edward Thomas

1. What striking impressions of the speaker’s thoughts and feelings does Thomas create for you in Rain? (486 words) 2. How does Edward Thomas’s use of language and structure contribute to the overall impact of the poem “Rain”? (595 words) 3. How does Edward Thomas’s use of imagery, repetition, and simile contribute to the exploration of themes such as solitude, mortality, and the complex relationship between the self and nature in the poem “Rain”? (497 words) 4. 10 probable questions about the poem (one essay outline of 354 words)

Edward Thomas was a respectful literary critic before he started his literary career as a poet, persuaded by Robert Frost. Edward Thomas enlisted in the British Army in 1915 and volunteered to go to the war front in 1917, although he had the offer to be an instructor at Hare Hall Camp in Romford. Edward Thomas was killed in action in April 1917 in the Battle of Somme. His decision to enlist and volunteer to fight at the front astonished everybody as he was exempted from service due to his weak foot, but according to Cardiff University,” he was  suffocated by family life, and plagued by depression and self-doubt concerning his literary abilities. Joining the army was a successful attempt to seek personal and literary salvation.” ( https://edwardthomas100.weebly.com/war.html )

The poem Rain , written in 1916 at the army barrack, is based on an earlier event of a downpour in Berkshire, a county along the prehistoric Icknield Way ( The Icknield Way , written in 1911 and published in 1913, is a collection of Thomas’ travel observations and reflections across the ancient Icknield Way).

The poem “Rain” should be read in the context of the looming war and in conjunction with his travel notebook The Icknield Way as his poems often emerge from his prose adding greater depth to the poem. Edward Thomas like Robert Lowell suffered from neurotic episodes or melancholy which is often considered a distinct feature of creativity. He also failed to find solace in nature as he experienced a sense of alienation from the transcendental aspect of nature. This sense of melancholy and alienation can be associated with the rise of mechanistic science in the seventeenth century and the socioeconomic factors of the period. Stan Smith writes that ‘Nature for Thomas is both a desolate emptiness outside the mind and a flood of vital creation from which the self is excluded’ and implies that the image of rain often links these two aspects.

The poem is a soliloquy and the voice belongs to the poet, Edward Thomas. The poem has only two sentences and the repetition of words and phrases throughout the poem is suggestive of the rain beating down monotonously.

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain

On this bleak hut and solitude, and me Remembering again that I shall die

In the first line, “rain” is repeated thrice to replicate the monotonous sound of rain hitting the roof and windows of the army hut. The enjambed second line allows the poet to reinforce the idea that the thought of death has recurred to him in frightful existential isolation. The third line does not however end with the thought of impending death, it continues on to 4th line begins with the conjunction “And”, and gains momentum with “neither” adding a negative connotation to the verbs “hear” and “thanks” and ends in 6th line referring again to solitude.

And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks

For washing me cleaner than I have been

Since I was born into this solitude.

The poet broods on his mortality and observes how it will continue to rain on his grave even after he has died. The repeated use of the word “solitude” suggests that Thomas deemed himself alone and not a part of nature. On his death, he will be reunited with nature, and the rain will cleanse him of the misery and despair that he has been subjected to in life. The rain is also symbolic of baptism and thus gives the readers a strange sense of hope.

Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:

The phraseology of this line is similar to the beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount; “Blessed are…”. The line shifts the focus from self to others. It is identical to the line that ends Chapter XI (NINTH DAY—STREATLEY TO EAST HENDRED, BY UPTON AND HAGBOURNE HILL FARM) of The Icknield Way conveying a sense of relief and thankfulness. The above lines underscore the inevitability of death and present it as a somewhat appealing end to life.

But here I pray that none whom once I loved

Is dying tonight or lying still awake

Solitary, listening to the rain,

Either in pain or thus in sympathy

rain, pain – assonance

These lines waver between prayer and lamentation as “rain” symbolizes the raging war as his attention shifts to the world beyond the self. The preoccupation with death is no longer appealing when one is reminded of the bleak image of the war front and the trenches where lonely young soldiers lay awake fighting or injured.

Helpless among the living and the dead,

Like a cold water among broken reeds,

Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,

Like me who has no love when this wild rain

Has not dissolved except the love of death,

Helpless among the living and the dead,/Like a cold water among broken reeds – simile

still and stiff – alliteration

Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,/ Like me who have no love – simile

Edward Thomas sinks deeper into self-absorption with the two consecutive similies. Thomas associates himself with “the cold water” as he feels helpless like the cold stagnant water that can not sustain life or perform ablution like rain. The reeds that are broken are the symbols of dead soldiers. “Myriad” refers to the countless thousands that have died in the war. The vivid image of the reeds “all still and stiff” symbolizes the corpses lying about on the battlefield. Thomas expresses his resemblance to the reeds as he too is a broken man, cast down by life’s adversities. The war deaths remind Thomas again of his longing for death that rain has failed to mitigate.

If love it be towards what is perfect and

Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

Edward Thomas suggests that death presents a prospect of completion through the oblivion of self and therefore is desirable. However, there is a shadow of ambiguity (“If love it be”) and Thomas seems to accept the finality with stoic resignation.

• Smith, Stan. Edward Thomas , London: Faber and Faber, 1986

https://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/rain

LitCharts: https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/edward-thomas/rain

Poen Analysis: https://poemanalysis.com/edward-thomas/rain/

Poetry Prof: https://poetryprof.com/rain/

The Second Coming

William Butler Yeats HISTORICAL and BIBLICAL CONTEXT “The Second Coming” by W.B. Yeats was written in 1919 and published in The Nation and The Dial in November 1920. Later, it was included in Yeats’s collection “Michael Robartes and the Dancer” (1921). Yeats wrote this poem at the end of World War I (1914-1918), a conflictContinue…

Sarojini Naidu: The Bangle Sellers

About the poet: Sarojini Naidu, often celebrated as “The Nightingale of India,” is a prominent Indian poet renowned for her evocative expression of romantic sensibilities and passion. Her works encapsulate the essence of Indian culture and civilization, reflecting the era she lived in. “The Bangle Sellers” epitomizes these themes by delving into the life ofContinue…

Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

William Wordsworth Lines 1–8 (2 quatrains, each rhymed abab) 1 st quatrain (4 lines) Earth has not any thing to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty: This City now doth, like a garment, wear 2nd quatrain The beauty of the morning;Continue…

Sister Nivedita Analysis It was in the course of an open-air meal in the Mogul Gardens at Achhabal, that the Swami suddenly announced that he would go to Amarnath with the pilgrims, and take his daughter with him. Within our little party, there was too much feeling of delighted congratulation, for any obstacle to beContinue…

The Swami and Mother-Worship

Sister Nivedita MCQs discussed and explained: Analysis The story of the glimpses which I caught of this part of the Swami’s life would be singularly incomplete, if it contained no mention of his worship of the Mother. Spiritually speaking, I have always felt that there were two elements in his consciousness. The story of this partContinue…

Romesh Gunesekera Romesh Gunesekera was born in 1954 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and later moved to England in 1971. He achieved an Arts Council Writers’ Award in 1991. His literary works often revolve around the ethnic and political tensions in Sri Lanka. “Monkfish Moon” is a collection of short stories reflecting these themes, published inContinue…

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The Rain Summary 10th Class Quotations: Summary and Quotes

Hello everyone! I hope you are doing well and enjoying every moment of your life. Today, I am so glad because I found something really special and I want to share them with you in a file. It’s a PDF where I explore the Summary of the “Rain” story by W. Somerset Maugham and some quotations about it for class 10th students. Let’s dive into it and explore the world of W. Somerset Maugham’s “Rain” story.

The Rain Summary 10th Class Quotations PDF:

The Rain Summary 10th Class Quotations PDF includes:

• Summary of W. Somerset Maugham’s “Rain” story.
• Almost 6 quotes about W. Somerset Maugham’s “Rain” story with the quote holder’s name.

How to Download:

To download the PDF about W. Somerset Maugham’s “Rain” story summary and quotations, just click on the “Download” button given above.

Reflection:

These quotes offer deep insights into the moral dilemmas and human weakness shown in “Rain.” They remind us of the universal struggle between righteousness and tests, and the disadvantages of judgment without understanding.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, the “Rain” story by W. Somerset Maugham is a great story that continues with the readers for its exploration of morality and human desires. Let’s value the lessons we have learned from it and try to use empathy and understanding in our own lives.

Thanks for Reading and giving your time to this article and PDF. I hope you enjoyed our article and PDF too and explored a treasure of information about W. Somerset Maugham’s “Rain” story summary and quotations. So, don’t forget to share it with your classmates, family members, friends, nearby, and everyone who wants to learn the summary of W. Somerset Maugham’s “Rain” story and its quotations.

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Singin' in the Rain

By gene kelly , gene kelly.

• Singin' in the Rain Summary

Don Lockwood is a very popular silent movie star who started out as a singer and dancer on the vaudeville circuit, then a stuntman, and then transitioned into becoming a star. The movie studio has created a fake romance between Don and his leading lady, Lina Lamont , to generate public interest about their films. The only problem with this is that Don cannot stand Lina, a vain, crass, and unlikeable woman who happens to look very good on film.

One night, when Lockwood is overwhelmed by a throng of over-enthusiastic fans who rip his jacket, he jumps into a passing car driven by a pretty young woman named Kathy Selden . She tells him that she is a stage actress and sneers at his film work, which infuriates, but also intrigues him. He runs into Kathy again at a party thrown by the head of his movie studio, R.F. Simpson. Simpson is excited to show a short segment of his new "talking" picture, but it doesn't seem to impress anyone. Don learns that Kathy, his new "stage actress" friend, is actually a chorus girl, and when Lockwood teases her for it, she throws a pie at him, misses, and hits Lina Lamont, who immediately has the studio fire Kathy. Later, Lockwood runs into Kathy working on another film, and the couple falls in love. They must keep their romance a secret from Lina, however, who would not approve of it.

When the very first talking picture, The Jazz Singer, is a huge hit with audiences, Simpson realizes he must convert the Lockwood and Lamont movie they are making into a talkie. The production of Simpson's first talkie is calamitous, mostly because of Lockwood's lack of credibility as a dramatic actor and Lina's horrible speaking voice/failures using a microphone. The test screening is a disaster and Lockwood's career is now hanging in the balance.

While lamenting the failure of the talkie at Lockwood's house, Don's best friend, Cosmo Brown , has an idea that might salvage the film. He suggests over-dubbing Lina's grating voice with Kathy's, and also persuades Simpson to change the film from The Dueling Cavalier to The Dancing Cavalier , a musical. The studio agrees and they set to work making a movie musical.

Lina is absolutely furious to learn that her voice is going to be dubbed by Kathy, and her fury intensifies when she discovers the romance between Kathy and Don. She tries to sabotage their relationship, and when she finds out that Kathy is going to receive a screen credit for her performance, she blackmails Simpson into withholding credit and engineers a power play to silence Kathy, a contract player and an unknown.

The premiere of the film is a tremendous success, but when the audience asks Lina to sing live, Simpson has to quickly improvise; Lina will lip-sync in front of the curtain while Kathy sings from behind the curtain, unseen by the audience. As Lina sings, however, Don, Cosmo and Simpson open the curtain behind her, revealing the deception to the audience. Lina is mortified and flees the stage. Kathy starts to run away too, but Don stops her and introduces her to the rapturous audience as "the real star of the film."

Don and Kathy perform a love song; the final shot of the movie shows Don and Kathy passionately kissing each other in front of a giant billboard advertising a film called Singin' in the Rain , starring Don Lockwood and Kathy Selden.

Singin’ in the Rain Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Singin’ in the Rain is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Study Guide for Singin’ in the Rain

Singin' in the Rain study guide contains a biography of Gene Kelly, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Singin' in the Rain
• Character List
• Director's Influence

Essays for Singin’ in the Rain

Singin' in the Rain essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Singin' in the Rain by Gene Kelly.

• Moses Supposes in Style: A Close Reading of an Iconic Scene in Singin' in the Rain

Wikipedia Entries for Singin’ in the Rain

• Introduction

The Art of Racing in the Rain

60 pages • 2 hours read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-10

Chapters 11-13

Chapters 14-16

Chapters 17-19

Chapters 20-25

Chapters 26-31

Chapters 32-35

Chapters 36-39

Chapters 40-48

Chapters 49-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Summary and Study Guide

Published in 2008, The Art of Racing in the Rain is a New York Times bestselling novel by Garth Stein. It follows the life of race car driver Denny Swift and is told from the perspective of his dog, Enzo . Stein was inspired to write the book after watching the 1998 Mongolian documentary State of Dogs about a dog who is reincarnated as a human after death, and after seeing the poet Billy Collins read a poem that is told from a dog’s point of view . Stein’s own experience as a race car driver provided the inspiration for Denny’s character. In 2019, a film adaption of the book was made starring Milo Ventimiglia and Amanda Seyfried as Denny and Eve , with Kevin Costner providing the voice of Enzo.

Plot Summary

Enzo is a thoughtful, energetic dog living in Seattle with his master, Dennis “Denny” Swift. The story opens at a later point in time relative to the rest of the book, with Enzo past his prime and Denny a father and widower. Though the reader lacks the context of these two characters, the depth of Enzo’s perspective conveys two germane facts: he is as smart as a human, and he is ready to die. He believes that reincarnation into a human body is his ultimate destination.

Denny is a racecar driver, and Enzo shares his master’s affinity for vehicles. Their favorite pastime is watching footage of past races.

Enzo regularly diverts the narrative away from the central flow of the plot. He focuses instead on his puppy years, valued time spent with Denny, and his own ruminations about the racing world. These side-chapters always manage to intersect with the rest of the plot on a thematic level. Enzo is able to digest racing practices into profound philosophies of life.

The developing trust between Enzo and Denny gets momentarily interrupted by the appearance of Eve, Denny’s future wife. Enzo feels threatened by her presence and the control she exerts over their home life, but warms to her when she becomes pregnant with Denny’s daughter, Zoe. Eve enlists Enzo to be Zoe’s protector, which offers him a renewed sense of purpose.

Enzo smells a sickness in Eve’s head, but his inability to communicate on a human level means he cannot warn anyone of her condition in time to treat it. Meanwhile, Denny leaves on racing tours for longer and longer periods of time. His absence and Eve’s sickness put their marriage through a stress test. Just as Eve’s condition seems to be improving, she falls and hits her head on a rock. She goes to the hospital, where doctors confirm the presence of a mass in her brain.

As Eve recuperates and comes to terms with the reality of her condition, her parents (Trish and Maxwell) convince Denny to let Eve remain with them. They later convince Denny to let Zoe join her mother for what time she has left. Throughout this period of time, Denny grows more distant from Eve.

Denny takes a trip for Presidents’ Day, where 15 year-old Annika develops a crush on him. He leaves early to beat a storm, and Annika manipulates the course of events to join him for the long ride back. Annika takes some sexual liberties with an exhausted and partially-unconscious Denny, but he puts a stop to it and sees her home to her parents.

Eve reaches a point where she has outlived her prognosis by one day. She holds a party to celebrate life, and promptly dies.

Trish and Maxwell initiate proceedings to sue Denny for custody of Zoe. Denny gets a good lawyer, but this head of steam is interrupted when Annika accuses him of rape. Denny is arrested, and the likelihood of his successful custody battle is suddenly uncertain. The combination of lawsuit and criminal charges ostracize him from Eve’s family completely.

After their initial court date, Denny is granted visitation rights with Zoe. They are able to use this time to grow closer in spite of Eve’s absence. Denny soon runs out of money to continue the lawsuit, and sells off his assets for a modest living arrangement.

At the height of financial woes, Enzo gets hit by a car. Denny can barely scrap together the funds to pay for his veterinary bills, but he does not give in to Trish and Maxwell’s settlement offers.

Denny is offered a job testing Ferraris on a famous Italian track. He is informed that the job will be waiting for him when his legal proceedings are concluded. 

Enzo and Denny spot Annika outside of a coffee shop. Denny confronts her, explaining his current scenario in sympathetic terms. It’s unclear if his words make any impact.

Denny’s parents visit to deliver good news: they’ve mortgaged their house and farm in order to finance the remainder of Denny’s custody battle.

The day of the trial arrives, and Annika takes the stand. All charges are dropped, as is the custody suit.

Feeling a sense of closure, that he’s done what he can to help Denny, Enzo collapses and dies. He prays that he can be reborn as a human, like he always wished.

The epilogue takes place in Italy, where Denny has evolved into a racing sensation. An older Zoe introduces him to his biggest fan: a young boy names Enzo. Denny seems to recognize something of his dog in the boy, and offers to act as his mentor. 

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The Rain Summary 10th Class Outstanding and Easy

The Rain Summary 10th Class

Today I am going to write a summary of the poem The Rain by W. H. Davies. The Rain Summary 10th class is written in two formats here. The easy and outstanding summaries for different students.

The Rain Summary 10th Class Easy

“Nature and the hardships of the poor” are W. H. Davies’ favorite themes. In this poem, he also expresses his clear and lovely views about nature and social discrimination. He says that he hears raindrops falling on the leaves of trees. He feels as if leaves are drinking raindrops. The rich leaves which are on the top, are giving these drops, gradually to the poor leaves beneath. These green leaves drinking raindrops make a sweet noise.

He says that when the rain stops, the sun will come out. The wondrous sunshine will brighten each round drop. He hopes that when the Sun shines, there will be a lovely sight. In this way, the poet very beautifully describes the natural phenomena of rain. He also expresses his hope for good days. He says that there would be equality in society just like the sunshine which spreads and benefits everyone all over the world equally.

The Rain Summary 10th Class Outstanding

“Rain” is a lyrical poem written by W.H. Davies. Nature and Hardship are focal themes of the poet. Poet has drawn a picturesque scene of the rain. The poem seems a musical note written by the nature. The poem deals with the poet’s view about social discrimination. He has personified nature, rain, tree and leaves remarkably to explain the biasness in society.

He elaborates on the natural phenomenon of rain. The rain falls, doing pitter-patter and the poet listens keenly to the sound. He says that it seems the leaves are drinking rain. He explains the injustice in society while giving examples of rich and poor leaves. He compares rich leaves to rich people and poor leaves to poor people. When it rains, the rich leaves drink raindrops while giving drop after drop to the poor leaves who are beneath the rich ones.

This metaphorical example highlights that the rich get more opportunities and first chances and what is left, is given to the poor. Poet’s spirit is not hopeless. He is hopeful to have equity in society, very soon. He is positive about the fact that one day, the poor shall get their due share soon. After the rain stops; the sun will come out.

Spreading and soothing sunshine will make every drop of water, shine like a diamond. Poet dreams of the soon coming days that would bring justice, equality, peace and stability to society. Like the sun shines equally in every part of the world, the same way the happiness, ease, opportunities and joy would be for everyone too. Rich and poor shall enjoy everything indiscriminately and equality shall prevail in society.

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Rain Poem by Edward Thomas�Summary, Notes and Line by Line Explanation in English for Students

 introduction.

The speaker of the poem opens by describing how a steady stream of raindrops beat down on the roof of his “bleak hut.” His health is not very good. The speaker is by himself in a trench somewhere in the First World War battlefields. He muses over death in general and his mortality in particular while he is there. He goes on to explain that there are benefits to the rain. He’s been “cleaner” after using it than he’s been in a while. It has shown itself to be the one love he can rely on by acting in this way. In the last few words, the speaker rejects all that is “perfect” because it can’t be relied upon. However, death is inevitable. 

About the Poet 

One stanza of the text contains eighteen lines, which make up the poem. There is a lot of repetition and a metrical rhythm, however, Thomas has opted not to adopt a regular rhyme scheme. The majority of the lines follow the most often-used rhythmic scheme, iambic pentameter.

The speaker is reminded that they will eventually “die” by the rain. This ominous statement instantly immerses the reader in his reality. He is experiencing something unfathomable to most people. He intends to portray what it was like to live with the continual awareness of one’s death in “Rain.” His lonely moments simply serve to serve as another reminder of his impending demise.

The speaker goes on to discuss the characteristics of rain and how it affects those who are similar to him in the following few sentences. He starts by talking about the “dead” that are beneath the rain. They are “Blessed” no matter where they are as long as the rain touches them. It acts as a purifying force, aiding in the removal of the bigger tragedy of death as well as the stains left by the conflict.  

The speaker “pray[s] that none of those he previously “loved” are living as he is today, from where he sits in his hut. He is aware of how alone he is and does not want anyone else to be in his shoes. The orator expresses his wish that his loved ones are secure and not “dying tonight or lying still awake / Solitary.” He acknowledges at the end of this section that some of these individuals may be “in sympathy,” alone in their thoughts about the persons they love. In any case, he doesn’t want his loved ones to go through this.

The speaker returns to his condition in the last four lines, imagining that others do not have “no love” that has been “dissolved” by the rain. Well, not besides the “love of death,” no love. The speaker’s thoughts are now consumed by this power. It is constantly there and getting bigger and bigger. He loves “death” because he believes it cannot disappoint, thus his love appears reasonable. He loves something almost palpable but unavoidable, as opposed to something that is “perfect” and “Cannot” ever truly exist. You can rely on death when all else fails. 

Edward Thomas’s 1916 poem “Rain,” written amid the depressing effects of World War I, is more than just a weather report; it’s a potent picture of mortality, loneliness, and the comfort that comes from being in nature.

The speaker’s compassion goes beyond their situation. Echoing the wider effects of the conflict, “Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon,” acknowledges the suffering of both the living and the dead. Thomas’s increasing knowledge of the cost of the struggle is reflected in his sympathy.

“Rain” is a testament to Thomas’s extraordinary creativity since it captures the nuanced feelings of a person coping with loss, loneliness, and conflict while still providing a glimmer of hope amid misery.

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Garth Greenwell

The novelist on writing about the body in crisis.

A risk of all writing about embodiment is that the writer’s thinking overtakes the messy material itself, leading to banality or sentimentality or false tidiness. Everyone knows that writing about sex is hard; what fewer people are aware of is that it is just as hard, or even harder, to write about illness. (Working on my last book, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness , I found myself lamenting the fact that literature has so little to say about illness . In particular, we still have too few novels or poems that forcefully capture the bewildering experience of entering the bureaucracies of the modern Western healthcare system at our most mortally vulnerable moments.) The novelist Garth Greenwell has produced some of the best writing about sex in our time; perhaps it is not a surprise, then, that in his new novel, Small Rain, he offers an exquisite addition to the literature of illness.

I have been excited for Small Rain ever since I heard Greenwell read a virtuosic passage from it at The Yale Review Festival in 2023. The novel is narrated by a mid-career poet who undergoes a serious medical crisis and ends up in the hospital for around two weeks. The novel’s story is largely contained to that period of time, and within the slurry of hours it portrays, Small Rain meditates on mortality and the politics of COVID; the recompense of art, especially poetry; and the ultimate redemption that domesticity, despite its dailiness, brings. Few writers at work today can think the body onto the page with as much complexity and reality as Greenwell does in this book.

We corresponded by Google doc this August; the result has been lightly edited. — Meghan O’Rourke, Editor

Meghan O’Rourke Small Rain stages a writer’s confrontation with mortality and unimaginable pain—a medical crisis which brings him into the grips of a bureaucratic medical system. Why did you think this was the material for a novel?

Garth Greenwell The book is not autobiography, but I underwent a medical crisis in 2020 similar to the narrator’s and emerged from it utterly bewildered—about what my body had undergone, about what the experience meant for my understanding of my life. That state of bewilderment is what compels writing for me, or at least novel writing. I think we need art because there are situations we can’t think about with our other tools for thinking. I couldn’t reason my way to an understanding of what had happened to me; I needed to dwell in it. And to do that I needed the tools of fiction: character and scene, and also the peculiar pressure of the aesthetic.

By “aesthetic,” I just mean work whose meaning resides not just in its content, in what it says, but in its medium. In aesthetic writing, the nondenotative aspects of language—syntax, image, repetition, rhythm, the deep histories of words—become dense with meaning and emotion; they exert a pressure on connotative meaning; they allow language to mean more . Aesthetic writing isn’t particular to fiction, of course, but the aesthetic is more available to me, just because of my sensibility, the tools I have at my disposal, in fiction.

I also needed invention, I needed to make things up. People sometimes treat my fiction, which often uses material from my life, as though it were a transcription of my experience. It isn’t. It has always been clear to me that my books are, and that I want them to be, fiction; all three of them are full of invention. When people ask me, as they sometimes do, how much of a novel is “true,” it feels like a category error. The ideas of true and false don’t map onto the literary object we’re supposedly discussing. Lived experience has been utterly transformed. It’s like looking at someone’s oil painting and asking, “How much of that is flax?”

MO’R Ha! As a poet who draws on lived experience, I think of the poems as aesthetic objects that have little to do with autobiography—so this is a satisfying analogy.

At one point in Small Rain , the narrator says, “The pain defied description, on a scale of one to ten it demanded a different scale.” In her own writing about illness, Virginia Woolf lamented what she called “the poverty of the language” we have for illness and pain. As she put it, “Let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself.” Do you agree? Was overcoming this poverty of the language part of the aesthetic challenge of writing this book?

GG I think that’s just baked into art as one of the challenges; we always feel the poverty of our medium. (We also often feel its richness.) Art tries to make incommensurate things commensurate. Trying to put the world on the page is a wildly quixotic endeavor: How does one translate sight or taste into language, much less feeling? I’ve often said that writing sex (which I’m often asked about) and writing the experience of eating a muffin are equally difficult to do well, by which I mean absolutely impossible. All writing strives to cross that gap between experience and the medium we have to express experience.

That said, I do think extreme pain doesn’t just resist but destroys language; it places our medium beyond our grasp.

MO’R Precisely. In her seminal text, The Body in Pain , Elaine Scarry famously wrote, “Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language.” As someone who has experienced many kinds of pain—some obliterating, some chronic—I felt you fully captured the strangeness of acute pain. (For another conversation: There is, too, the way both sex and pain can produce a kind of shame that is almost hard to recognize one feels.)

GG I think that’s true. I think I’ve always been interested in the body in crisis—and sex and pain are both kinds of crisis. In Small Rain , the narrator says he feels annihilated by the pain, “a creature evacuated of soul.” It’s important that in that first line of the novel he’s reporting his experience of that first crushing pain, not in the grip of it. In the grip of it, he’s not capable of speech. Woolf has that beautiful image in her essay on sickness of the utterly inviolable privacy of some secret chamber of the self: she says it’s like a patch of ground where not even the prints of bird feet disturb the snow. That’s where overwhelming, crushing pain resides. I don’t want to say it places us beyond humanness; clearly, it’s part of humanness, something that we undergo. But it displaces many of the recognizable signposts of human experience.

MO’R The writing about your narrator’s hospital stay is granular and detailed. You make the reader feel the almost second-by-second ordeal of being in a hospital—the many needles, the noises, the lights, the grim ceiling tiles one stares at during even grimmer procedures. (This all rang true to me as someone who has spent a lot of time in hospitals.) Why did you decide to enact the reality of the medical system in such detail?

GG Mostly because I just thought it was interesting . Woolf also notes in her essay that the experience of being gravely ill—or even of being moderately ill, of being indisposed—is weirdly underreported in literature. (I’ve started keeping a list of great hospital sequences in literature; it’s a surprise to me how few they are.) The texture of life in the hospital, which is at once utterly regimented and also weirdly unmoored, rigidly timed and timeless—capturing that texture is one of the projects of the book.

MO’R “Rigidly timed and timeless” is a fantastic description of hospital chronology.

I like narratives that have clocks, because clocks (paradoxically, maybe) give you enormous freedom with time.

GG I do think that’s how it feels. And capturing the texture of existence is at the heart of artmaking for me. If there is a hope of uncovering the revelatory, of arriving at something “universal” to human experience, it lies in the devotion to the particular, in examining the moment-by-moment experience of an embodied being. Certainly that’s true of the tradition I feel like I’m working in, which I guess I would call the novel of consciousness.

MO’R Narrative time in Small Rain moves slowly and blurrily, much the way it does in hospitals. Tell us more about the formal choices that you made here—why and how did you slow time down so much?

GG This ties in with the idea of the novel of consciousness, which has a deep kinship with the lyric poem. It depends on a kind of sifting of experience. We are quicksilver beings; we can experience in a flash the whole gamut of emotion. Slowing down time offers a chance to unpack experience, to try to sift through the information that makes charged moments feel charged.

I like narratives that have clocks, because clocks (paradoxically, maybe) give you enormous freedom with time. If something is keeping external clock time for you, you’re free to explore internal time, our experience of time (now fast, now slow) as wildly as you want. Virginia Woolf can fly off anywhere she wants in Mrs. Dalloway because the chimes of Big Ben will always anchor her again in clock time. The regimentation of the hospital is something like that. Every four hours, the narrator will get his pain medication; every eight hours, he’ll have a heparin shot. So the narrative can go where it wants: to his childhood; to his relationship with his partner, L; to his thoughts on art and poetry.

The novel’s first sentence suggests how time will work in the novel. It places us in the ER, where the narrator is being asked about his experience; it also reaches back to the experience of the pain itself in that impossible attempt to recover and catch it. Time in the novel functions like a set of transparencies laid atop one another. Which is how memory works, I think, and especially how sensory experience interacts with memory: when we encounter a smell, for instance, or a taste, we also encounter all our memories of that smell or taste.

MO’R Researching The Invisible Kingdom I was struck by the fact that there are not as many English-language books about illness as I wished there were. I found myself clinging to the ones I liked—Anatole Broyard’s Intoxicated by My Illness ; Emily Dickinson’s poems about pain and migraines. Do you see yourself as writing within a tradition of literature of illness? If so, how did that shape your sense of what you were doing?

GG I don’t think I was consciously working within that tradition, in part because, as you say, there are fewer of those texts than one would expect. Certainly I had read around in what we might think of as the literature of illness, especially in the literature of AIDS—and Hervé Guibert’s accounts of hospitals and clinics, just to name one example, surely influenced the way I imagined those environments in Small Rain . But that wasn’t conscious. My greater awareness of literature exploring the experience of being a hospital patient has come after writing Small Rain , and again, it’s a little hard to find passages that do the work I’m interested in. There’s the beginning of James Baldwin’s Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone . There’s the (tremendously powerful) middle section of Miranda July’s The First Bad Man . There’s Pamela Erens’s Eleven Hours . I haven’t read the Broyard—I’ll seek it out.

MO’R I think it’s wonderful; it captures the disjunction between intimacy and bureaucracy that is key to our experience of health care. The other day, a newly minted medical doctor and I were talking about the challenges patients experience with our healthcare system, in particular in hospitals; a main problem, I suggested, is that we experience what for us are deeply intimate crises in the most bureaucratic and impersonal environments, amongst harried and busy strangers. I recall being struck that it was a doctor neither my mother nor I had ever met who, in the hospital, told us she was dying. Not her oncologist; not her primary care doctor; the random resident who was on call that day that she was admitted from the ER. I am not sure what there is to be done about this fact, but naming that reality, as you do, feels very important to me. What felt most important here about the milieu of the hospital as a setting for your book?

GG This was one of the primary points of fascination for me. The narrator receives so much particularized attention, and his body is made to produce so much particularized information. But that particular attention strips him of his individuality, of what he feels as his personhood. It’s only in his moments with his partner, L, that he feels returned to himself, a person again, not just a patient. He longs to be seen by someone who knows him in the context of his life outside the hospital, because so much of who he is is that context.

MO’R That longing to be fully seen in your hospital bed is very powerful; I felt it too. We want to be visible as we face our mortality.

GG That’s right, I think. But there’s an asymmetry built into the patient-health practitioner relationship: the patient is undergoing something utterly unprecedented, life-changing, all-consuming. The health practitioner is doing her job—a job that is largely routinized. The narrator in Small Rain feels himself reduced to “an interesting case” for the people who are treating him—and reduced is the word; he feels this as a diminishment. He’s affronted (when he’s not charmed) by the fact that the ICU nurses chatter about their days outside his room while he (and everyone else in the ICU) is undergoing something so dire.

That asymmetry doesn’t shut down human interaction, though, or human recognition: acts of tenderness, intimacy, connection still occur. The narrator compares his relationship to his nurses to his experience of teaching. The teacher-student relationship is asymmetrical, too—routine on one side and singular, unprecedented on the other. (You’re only ever a tenth grader once.) At the end of the day, the teacher goes home; she sets aside (or tries to, anyway) the urgent worries of the day, the narratives of her students’ lives. Surviving as an educator means drawing a boundary around one’s care for one’s students, leaving it, as best one can, in the classroom. That doesn’t negate the care; it doesn’t make it unreal. And both of these are relationships that have an ending baked in: for both the health practitioner-patient and the teacher-student relationship, success means the relationship ends.

MO’R Even as hospitals can feel impersonal and bureaucratic, they are full of some of the most tender and surprising intimacies we may ever encounter; I think of the ICU nurse that your narrator becomes friends with. There is an exquisite passage near the end of your book where a tired doctor sits down with your narrator and, perhaps because she has had a difficult day, engages with him about the difficulties of his experience more fully than anyone has so far. It’s a fantastic exchange. Can you tell us more about this section—why you wrote it, if you always knew it would be there, what it means to you?

I do think art is useful to us, but I think that usefulness is hugely mysterious—you can’t engineer it.

GG This is one of those humanizing moments. The danger of bureaucracy is that it can occlude personhood: thinking about someone as a patient can get in the way of seeing them as a full human being. On one hand, I’m not sure there’s really a way to get around this, or even that we would want to get around it; if thinking of me as a piece of faulty machinery allows a surgeon, say, to intervene in a way that keeps me alive, think of me as faulty machinery! I don’t think we need everyone we interact with to behold us in the fullness of our complex humanity. Bureaucracy, routinization, efficiency—these all have their place. I don’t know where the right balance is—there isn’t a perfectly right balance, I’m sure—and I’m very glad that, as you said, my job as a novelist is to describe the problems as we live them, not to design solutions.

But even if those systems structure and limit the ways human beings relate to each other, they don’t entirely make human relating impossible. (Does anything?) A theme of all of my books is that any time two human beings have a face-to-face encounter, everything is possible—including cracks in bureaucracy, moments when two people can engage with each other as people. This is what the narrator feels in that moment with his surgeon, and he feels it happen more than once with Alivia, the nurse he spends the most time with. It felt important to me to have humanizing moments—not just because they’re moments where the narrator feels seen in a more adequate way but also because they’re moments when he sees , when the doctors and nurses become fuller human beings for him, too.

MO’R Some of the writing I admire most in Small Rain pertains to the narrator’s own discomfort in his body, and the gentle appreciation he comes to have for it. You’re written, previously, about eros; here, eros is replaced by thanatos —but also by a gentler emotion: tenderness. Is this a book, in some ways, about the problem—and perhaps redemption—of being a mind that inhabits a body?

GG Absolutely, yes. In some sense, the book is also a kind of biography of the narrator’s body, the way his body is itself a historical record. He has always had an antagonistic relationship with it: he’s taken it for granted, but more than that, he’s resented it, even hated it. There’s a crucial moment in the book, when the narrator is being bathed, that is among the most difficult things I’ve written. He looks at his body—which is covered in bruises and traces of adhesive, which has IVs and A-lines running into both arms—and, in describing it, comes to see his body as a suffering creature, as something available not just to the disgust and resentment he has always felt for it, but also to love. It’s a kind of revolution for him to think that, to see the possibility (even if it remains, for him, impossible) of a radically different relationship to his body.

MO’R Even as the novel keeps us almost claustrophobically inside the hospital, we learn a lot about L, the narrator’s boyfriend/partner, and how the two met and bought a house. Why did you include this interlude—which is a kind of reprieve from the hospital—in the book?

GG I guess I think one of the central questions of the book is domesticity—its pleasures and discontents and, more than that, whether it’s possible to remain attentive to the experience of long life with another—I mean whether it’s possible to resist growing numbed or deadened to one’s day-to-day experience. Certainly my narrator has stopped seeing his life in anything like its fullness. He takes it for granted, as he has come, at least in some ways—maybe not disastrous but not great, either—to take L for granted.

Then illness and pain take that life away from him—for a few days, at least, it seems entirely possible that he might die. The paradox is that in taking that life away, illness restores his life to him: it shocks him into attentiveness. You know, in my first two books, this narrator is very attached to a sense of his life as adventure—as geographic adventure (they’re books about an American abroad), and even more as erotic adventure. To be in his early forties, seven years into a long-term partnership, sharing a mortgage in a small midwestern town—from a certain perspective, that might seem like the opposite of adventure. But in the light of his own mortality, in that new attentiveness to his life this sickness gives him, he can recognize that domesticity is an adventure too.

MO’R The book is set during the pandemic and COVID politics play a role in setting up the atmosphere. Is the connection of the political and personal here important to you?

GG It is, and I think the explicit meditations on politics, and on life in a particular moment in America, are one way in which this book departs from my earlier work. I wanted to capture somehow, from the vantage of this hospital bed, in which an individual body is in terrifying, maybe terminal crisis, how the larger social body is in crisis too.

Or that’s how it seems to me now, looking back. As I was writing, I was just trying to capture what it felt like to be in a particular body in a particular place at a particular time—and that means, necessarily, thinking about the larger social world in which that body is situated. Late summer 2020 was tumultuous: COVID, bizarre anti-masking hysteria, the approaching election, Black Lives Matter protests. It felt as if the country was under immense stress, as if the idea of a common national project had shifted out of reach.

The narrator lives in a small blue town in a very red state. There’s no sealing himself off, as one can at least somewhat do in larger cities, from people who hold political beliefs that are repugnant to him. He’s also a newish homeowner. This makes him think about how we live with one another, and it makes him take seriously virtues he had maybe been disdainful of before, virtues of neighborliness: the meaningfulness of talking about the weather, of bringing somebody a batch of cookies when a storm has damaged their house. A certain kind of thinking sees the political as utterly suffusing existence, and I guess I think there’s a way in which that’s true. But the narrator comes to see that maybe it’s not the whole truth, and maybe the project of civilization, minimally conceived—the ability to live together without violence—depends on valuing spaces and ways of being with each other that de-emphasize explicit political allegiance. Some of the narrator’s neighbors are Trump voters. They’re still his neighbors.

MO’R As someone whose own work is invested in reimagining contemporary health care, restoring the ethic of care at the heart of it, I find myself hoping that doctors, nurses, and hospitalists read this book; certainly, I’ll be recommending it to them. Do you have any such hopes? Do you think Small Rain might help shine a light onto the human realities behind medical bureaucracy, or is such a consideration not present when you are shaping a narrative?

GG Writing is such a private act; for the years that I work on a book, I’m not thinking at all about who might read it. I do think art is useful to us, but I think that usefulness is hugely mysterious—you can’t engineer it. I sometimes think that the usefulness of art depends on a commitment to defending art’s uselessness. What I mean is that it’s only through an utter commitment to its own private, often formal or aesthetic ambition, however sealed off from utility it might seem, that art can become publicly useful—that it can “shine a light onto human realities,” in your beautiful phrase. I’m being vague; I’m not sure I can do better. Maybe what I mean is that we can never know how our books are going to be received, how they will be useful (or fail to be useful) to other people. The idea that we can know the effect of anything we make is always an illusion. But for art to have a chance of reaching other people at all it has to have integrity first and foremost as art.

The ambition of this book—to embody, as deeply and vividly and complexly as possible, the experience of being a particular embodied being in time—is a formal project. I never write with any utility, any lesson, in mind. Existence doesn’t offer lessons—though my narrator might be seeking them. But the experience of stepping into the light of another person’s existence—the experience art offers with a vividness and profundity unavailable elsewhere—can have profound effects. I do hope doctors and other care providers read this book. Art calls us to attention—attention to the world, to the personhood of others. And attention is the heart of care.

The Shapes of Grief

Writing in pictures, louise glück’s late style, you might also like, a moral education, three queer writers on craft and cruising, revisiting andrew holleran's dancer from the dance, new perspectives, enduring writing.

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The Art of Racing in the Rain

Garth stein.

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Enzo , an elderly dog, is sprawled on the kitchen floor of his owner, Denny' s, apartment in a puddle of his own urine. He tells the reader that he's staging this display so that Denny, who has been through so much in the last few years, will see that it's time to let Enzo go. When Denny gets home he gives Enzo a bath, cleans up the mess, and calls Mike , his friend and coworker, and asks him to cover for him the next day so he can take Enzo to the vet. He says he's not sure it's a round trip visit, and despite having set it up, Enzo is surprised. He reaffirms though that it's for the best, and now Denny can be free.

Enzo loves racing, and sprinkles racing strategy, wisdom, and stories throughout the novel. His favorite driver is Ayrton Senna , a charismatic driver who drove exceptionally well in the rain , just like Denny does. The events surrounding his death remain a mystery.

Enzo goes back in time to explain the ten years of events leading up to his “display.” Denny, a professional racecar driver, adopted him as a puppy and moved him to Seattle. For the first year it was just Denny and Enzo, but then Denny met Eve and quickly fell in love with her. Enzo tried to love her, but resented her for coming between himself and Denny. Denny and Eve were married within the year and Eve soon became pregnant. When the baby was born, Denny was across the country competing. After the birth, Eve asked Enzo to protect her daughter, whom they named Zoë . Denny returned the next day and shares that another driver on his team crashed their car and he never even got to drive.

The next several months passed quickly and happily until Eve and Denny went back to work and Zoë was put in daycare. Enzo was left home alone. He was bored and lonely until one day Denny left the TV on by accident, and Enzo spent the entire day watching. From that time on, Denny leaves the TV on for Enzo during the day, and Enzo's education truly begins. Enzo believes himself to have a very human soul, and uses television to learn how to be more human. After seeing a documentary on Mongolia, he learns that dogs are reincarnated as men when they die, and this becomes his goal. He spends the rest of his life trying to be as human as possible to prepare for his next life as a human.

After Zoë's second birthday, the family moves into a small house. Enzo can smell something wrong with Eve, although she doesn't know it yet. She begins experiencing sporadic episodes of migraines, nausea, and mood swings. One weekend, when Denny is gone for a race, Eve experiences a headache so bad she packs up Zoë and leaves for her parents' house, leaving Enzo alone for three days. Enzo rations the toilet water but can do nothing about food, and on the second night he begins to hallucinate. He sees Zoë's favorite toy, a stuffed zebra , come to life and molest all of her other toys. When Enzo goes to attack, the zebra eviscerates itself. When Denny returns to find Zoë's toys in ruin, he hits Enzo. Enzo believes the zebra framed him.

The following year, Denny secures a seat in a traveling racecar for a season. It means many absences, but Eve encourages him to go. The first few races go very poorly for Denny, and when he and Eve are discussing it at dinner one night, Denny says he needs to go away the following week to practice with his crew. Eve is angry and scared, and Zoë is refusing to eat her dinner, leading to a bigger fight. Eve finally agrees to make Zoë a hot dog, but when she tries to cut open the package, the knife slices into her hand. Eve, terrified, refuses to go to the doctor and Denny agrees to bandage it at home.

The season improves for Denny, and Eve's health improves for no apparent reason. In August, the family goes to the Slippery Slabs, a spot on a creek where Zoë can play. While lifting Zoë, Eve slips and falls on the rocks, hitting her head hard. Denny rushes her to the emergency room where they discover a large mass in her brain. Eve spends months in the hospital. Trish and Maxwell , Eve's parents, talk Denny into having Eve stay at their house when she's released, and to allow Zoë to stay with them as well so she can spend as much time as possible with her dying mother. Denny begrudgingly agrees. On her first night home, Eve, terrified, asks Enzo to protect her and not let her die that night. He stays awake the entire night.

Several months pass. In February, Denny, Enzo, and Zoë go to the mountains with Eve's extended family so Zoë can meet them. While there, a teenage daughter of one of Eve's cousins, Annika , develops a crush on Denny. When she learns that Denny will be leaving early to beat predicted bad weather, she decides she needs to leave early as well, and Denny agrees to take her. The five-hour drive takes ten due to the weather, and Annika decides to stay with Denny that night. Denny and Enzo fall asleep, and Enzo awakes to see Annika at the foot of Denny's bed taking Denny's pants off, and Enzo tells the reader that what she did must have been without Denny's consent. Finally, Enzo barks and wakes Denny, who leaps away, horrified. Annika tells Denny she loves him, but he refuses to engage with her. She calls her father and he comes to pick her up.

In the spring, Denny takes Enzo to California with him to a racetrack where he'll be driving for a television commercial, and he takes Enzo out on the track for a speed lap. Enzo loves the experience and it cements his love of racing. A month after they return to Seattle, Eve dies. Denny gets the phone call while he's at the dog park with Enzo, and overcome by emotion, Enzo runs away and kills and eats a squirrel. When Denny finds him later, they drive to Maxwell and Trish's house so Denny can say goodbye. After he does, Maxwell and Trish tell Denny that they're suing him for Zoë's custody.

Denny hires Mark Fein , a lawyer whose car Denny works on at the auto shop. He tells Denny that the suit is bogus and it'll be an easy win. Later that day, however, police officers come to Denny's work to arrest him for felony rape of a child—Annika's family had decided to press charges for what happened in February. Mark pays Denny's bail, and Denny and Enzo attend Eve's funeral a few days later. Enzo is diagnosed with hip dysplasia after experiencing major hip pain from walking hours to and from the funeral.

As winter arrives, Seattle gets a light dusting of snow. On a walk one night, Enzo is hit by a car. When Denny tries to pay the vet, he discovers he has no money, and Denny is embarrassed and ready to give up. A few weeks later, Denny and Enzo go to visit Mike to sign a settlement granting Denny a generous visitation schedule and settling for non-felony charges regarding Annika's case. Mike hands Denny a souvenir pen from the zoo to sign with, and Enzo sees a zebra floating in the pen. He realizes that the zebra isn't an outside demon, but rather a force within all of us, and he decides that Denny isn't going to accept the settlement. Ignoring the pain from his hips, Enzo grabs the papers off the table and leads Mike and Denny on a chase through the house, culminating in a leap out the window. In the backyard, Enzo urinates on the papers, and Denny decides he doesn't want to give up.

Later that summer while Denny is teaching at the Seattle racing school, Luca Pantoni , a man who works for Ferrari, asks Denny to show him around the track. After Denny lays down some hot laps, wowing the students and Enzo, Luca offers Denny a job testing cars and teaching for Ferrari in Italy. Denny declines, saying he can't leave the state, and Luca says the job will stay open until Denny is ready.

One winter evening when Denny and Enzo are out for a walk, they spot Annika sitting at an outdoor cafe. When they reach Annika, both Denny and Annika feign surprise at their meeting and Denny asks if he can sit down and speak with her for a moment. He apologizes for what happened and tells Annika that a relationship between them would never have worked. He says that the first time he saw Eve he could barely function, and he hopes that Annika finds someone someday that makes her feel like that. Finally, he says that because of her suit, he'll never be allowed to see Zoë again. When Denny is finished he and Enzo trot home, triumphant.

Denny's parents, whom Enzo has never met, come to visit. Denny's mother is blind and when she meets Zoë, Zoë sits very still while her grandmother explores her face. On the final night of their visit, Denny's father explains to Denny that they took out a reverse mortgage on their house so Denny could pay his legal fees. When Mike asks the next day, Enzo learns that Denny's parents effectively disowned him when he refused to care for his mother, but he had slowly built up a relationship over the last several years.

Denny's criminal trial begins soon after. Every day, Mike escorts Denny to court while Tony , Mike's partner, takes care of Enzo. On the third day, Tony receives a phone call that something is happening, and he and Enzo rush to the courthouse. They wait in the rain, and Enzo falls asleep and dreams of testifying in court using Stephen Hawking's voice synthesizer. He wakes to hear Denny saying that it's over, he won. Trish and Maxwell drop their custody suit the next day.

While Denny is making cookies in preparation for Zoë's return, the phone rings and it's Luca Pantoni. Denny says he'd like to accept Luca's offer, and asks Luca why he's made such a generous offer. Luca says that his own wife died, and it was the help from a mentor, his predecessor at Ferrari, that saved him, and so he wished to pass the gift on.

The next day, Enzo can barely get up. He goes to the kitchen where Denny is making pancakes and collapses. Denny cradles him, and Enzo experiences visions of the fields where he was born and flashes of the documentary on Mongolia. He starts to run through the fields, still hearing Denny's voice, and dies in Denny's arms.

The text jumps to a point in the future, where Denny has just won a Formula One race on the same track where Senna died. Zoë, now an adult, pulls up in a golf cart with two of Denny's fans, a father and a son. They ask for Denny's autograph, and Denny asks the boy his name. The boy replies that his name is Enzo, and he's going to be a champion. Denny gives the father his phone number and offers to teach Enzo to drive when he's old enough.

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The Endless Drama, and Tedium, of a Medical Mystery

Garth Greenwell takes on pain and illness in his new novel, “Small Rain.”

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SMALL RAIN , by Garth Greenwell

There may be many great poems about being an overweight kid at the seashore, but I am aware of only one: “On Home Beaches,” by Les Murray. The line that destroys me is the one in which the poet recalls being a “red boy, holding his wet T-shirt off his breasts.”

The unnamed narrator of Garth Greenwell’s third novel, “Small Rain,” loves Murray’s poem, too. He’s had stretch marks and “three rolls of flesh” on his stomach since he was a child. “For years even with lovers I refused to take off my shirt,” he says, “and I’m not sure I can remember ever being shirtless outside; it’s ridiculous how much the thought horrifies me.”

He’s a poet and a teacher who lives in Iowa City with his lover, L, who’s also a poet (and a more successful teacher). They’re renovating an old house. L is from Spain; they alternate days speaking in English and Spanish. They are bohemian lovebirds in mellow early-middle age, stranded almost happily in the Midwest.

One day the narrator experiences, out of the blue, annihilating physical pain, as if “someone had plunged a hand into my gut and grabbed hold and yanked.” He’s taken to the E.R. and then the I.C.U. This is the Covid era, and there are persistent delays and fears. He waits and waits for a diagnosis. His case is so unusual that specialists clamor to meet him, as if he were a candidate for a medical mystery column .

What he has, it turns out, is an infrarenal aortic dissection — a tear in the inner wall of his aorta. These can snuff you and are difficult to treat. They are usually seen in older people (the narrator is in his 40s) and those with comorbidities.

Most of “Small Rain” takes place in the hospital, where the narrator, with pills down his throat and tubes up his nose, wonders what will happen next, and if he will make it out alive. There is the usual humbling slapstick of bathroom visits and I.V.s and exploratory needle jabs. There is little talk about who will pay for these treatments. The narrator is surely in line for an invasive procedure Tony Soprano might call a walletdectomy.

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GPT-fabricated scientific papers on Google Scholar: Key features, spread, and implications for preempting evidence manipulation

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Academic journals, archives, and repositories are seeing an increasing number of questionable research papers clearly produced using generative AI. They are often created with widely available, general-purpose AI applications, most likely ChatGPT, and mimic scientific writing. Google Scholar easily locates and lists these questionable papers alongside reputable, quality-controlled research. Our analysis of a selection of questionable GPT-fabricated scientific papers found in Google Scholar shows that many are about applied, often controversial topics susceptible to disinformation: the environment, health, and computing. The resulting enhanced potential for malicious manipulation of society’s evidence base, particularly in politically divisive domains, is a growing concern.

Swedish School of Library and Information Science, University of Borås, Sweden

Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund University, Sweden

Division of Environmental Communication, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden

Research Questions

• Where are questionable publications produced with generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) that can be found via Google Scholar published or deposited?
• What are the main characteristics of these publications in relation to predominant subject categories?
• How are these publications spread in the research infrastructure for scholarly communication?
• How is the role of the scholarly communication infrastructure challenged in maintaining public trust in science and evidence through inappropriate use of generative AI?

research note Summary

• A sample of scientific papers with signs of GPT-use found on Google Scholar was retrieved, downloaded, and analyzed using a combination of qualitative coding and descriptive statistics. All papers contained at least one of two common phrases returned by conversational agents that use large language models (LLM) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Google Search was then used to determine the extent to which copies of questionable, GPT-fabricated papers were available in various repositories, archives, citation databases, and social media platforms.
• Roughly two-thirds of the retrieved papers were found to have been produced, at least in part, through undisclosed, potentially deceptive use of GPT. The majority (57%) of these questionable papers dealt with policy-relevant subjects (i.e., environment, health, computing), susceptible to influence operations. Most were available in several copies on different domains (e.g., social media, archives, and repositories).
• Two main risks arise from the increasingly common use of GPT to (mass-)produce fake, scientific publications. First, the abundance of fabricated “studies” seeping into all areas of the research infrastructure threatens to overwhelm the scholarly communication system and jeopardize the integrity of the scientific record. A second risk lies in the increased possibility that convincingly scientific-looking content was in fact deceitfully created with AI tools and is also optimized to be retrieved by publicly available academic search engines, particularly Google Scholar. However small, this possibility and awareness of it risks undermining the basis for trust in scientific knowledge and poses serious societal risks.

Implications

The use of ChatGPT to generate text for academic papers has raised concerns about research integrity. Discussion of this phenomenon is ongoing in editorials, commentaries, opinion pieces, and on social media (Bom, 2023; Stokel-Walker, 2024; Thorp, 2023). There are now several lists of papers suspected of GPT misuse, and new papers are constantly being added. 1 See for example Academ-AI, https://www.academ-ai.info/ , and Retraction Watch, https://retractionwatch.com/papers-and-peer-reviews-with-evidence-of-chatgpt-writing/ . While many legitimate uses of GPT for research and academic writing exist (Huang & Tan, 2023; Kitamura, 2023; Lund et al., 2023), its undeclared use—beyond proofreading—has potentially far-reaching implications for both science and society, but especially for their relationship. It, therefore, seems important to extend the discussion to one of the most accessible and well-known intermediaries between science, but also certain types of misinformation, and the public, namely Google Scholar, also in response to the legitimate concerns that the discussion of generative AI and misinformation needs to be more nuanced and empirically substantiated  (Simon et al., 2023).

Google Scholar, https://scholar.google.com , is an easy-to-use academic search engine. It is available for free, and its index is extensive (Gusenbauer & Haddaway, 2020). It is also often touted as a credible source for academic literature and even recommended in library guides, by media and information literacy initiatives, and fact checkers (Tripodi et al., 2023). However, Google Scholar lacks the transparency and adherence to standards that usually characterize citation databases. Instead, Google Scholar uses automated crawlers, like Google’s web search engine (Martín-Martín et al., 2021), and the inclusion criteria are based on primarily technical standards, allowing any individual author—with or without scientific affiliation—to upload papers to be indexed (Google Scholar Help, n.d.). It has been shown that Google Scholar is susceptible to manipulation through citation exploits (Antkare, 2020) and by providing access to fake scientific papers (Dadkhah et al., 2017). A large part of Google Scholar’s index consists of publications from established scientific journals or other forms of quality-controlled, scholarly literature. However, the index also contains a large amount of gray literature, including student papers, working papers, reports, preprint servers, and academic networking sites, as well as material from so-called “questionable” academic journals, including paper mills. The search interface does not offer the possibility to filter the results meaningfully by material type, publication status, or form of quality control, such as limiting the search to peer-reviewed material.

To understand the occurrence of ChatGPT (co-)authored work in Google Scholar’s index, we scraped it for publications, including one of two common ChatGPT responses (see Appendix A) that we encountered on social media and in media reports (DeGeurin, 2024). The results of our descriptive statistical analyses showed that around 62% did not declare the use of GPTs. Most of these GPT-fabricated papers were found in non-indexed journals and working papers, but some cases included research published in mainstream scientific journals and conference proceedings. 2 Indexed journals mean scholarly journals indexed by abstract and citation databases such as Scopus and Web of Science, where the indexation implies journals with high scientific quality. Non-indexed journals are journals that fall outside of this indexation. More than half (57%) of these GPT-fabricated papers concerned policy-relevant subject areas susceptible to influence operations. To avoid increasing the visibility of these publications, we abstained from referencing them in this research note. However, we have made the data available in the Harvard Dataverse repository.

The publications were related to three issue areas—health (14.5%), environment (19.5%) and computing (23%)—with key terms such “healthcare,” “COVID-19,” or “infection”for health-related papers, and “analysis,” “sustainable,” and “global” for environment-related papers. In several cases, the papers had titles that strung together general keywords and buzzwords, thus alluding to very broad and current research. These terms included “biology,” “telehealth,” “climate policy,” “diversity,” and “disrupting,” to name just a few.  While the study’s scope and design did not include a detailed analysis of which parts of the articles included fabricated text, our dataset did contain the surrounding sentences for each occurrence of the suspicious phrases that formed the basis for our search and subsequent selection. Based on that, we can say that the phrases occurred in most sections typically found in scientific publications, including the literature review, methods, conceptual and theoretical frameworks, background, motivation or societal relevance, and even discussion. This was confirmed during the joint coding, where we read and discussed all articles. It became clear that not just the text related to the telltale phrases was created by GPT, but that almost all articles in our sample of questionable articles likely contained traces of GPT-fabricated text everywhere.

Evidence hacking and backfiring effects

Generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) can be used to produce texts that mimic scientific writing. These texts, when made available online—as we demonstrate—leak into the databases of academic search engines and other parts of the research infrastructure for scholarly communication. This development exacerbates problems that were already present with less sophisticated text generators (Antkare, 2020; Cabanac & Labbé, 2021). Yet, the public release of ChatGPT in 2022, together with the way Google Scholar works, has increased the likelihood of lay people (e.g., media, politicians, patients, students) coming across questionable (or even entirely GPT-fabricated) papers and other problematic research findings. Previous research has emphasized that the ability to determine the value and status of scientific publications for lay people is at stake when misleading articles are passed off as reputable (Haider & Åström, 2017) and that systematic literature reviews risk being compromised (Dadkhah et al., 2017). It has also been highlighted that Google Scholar, in particular, can be and has been exploited for manipulating the evidence base for politically charged issues and to fuel conspiracy narratives (Tripodi et al., 2023). Both concerns are likely to be magnified in the future, increasing the risk of what we suggest calling evidence hacking —the strategic and coordinated malicious manipulation of society’s evidence base.

The authority of quality-controlled research as evidence to support legislation, policy, politics, and other forms of decision-making is undermined by the presence of undeclared GPT-fabricated content in publications professing to be scientific. Due to the large number of archives, repositories, mirror sites, and shadow libraries to which they spread, there is a clear risk that GPT-fabricated, questionable papers will reach audiences even after a possible retraction. There are considerable technical difficulties involved in identifying and tracing computer-fabricated papers (Cabanac & Labbé, 2021; Dadkhah et al., 2023; Jones, 2024), not to mention preventing and curbing their spread and uptake.

However, as the rise of the so-called anti-vaxx movement during the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing obstruction and denial of climate change show, retracting erroneous publications often fuels conspiracies and increases the following of these movements rather than stopping them. To illustrate this mechanism, climate deniers frequently question established scientific consensus by pointing to other, supposedly scientific, studies that support their claims. Usually, these are poorly executed, not peer-reviewed, based on obsolete data, or even fraudulent (Dunlap & Brulle, 2020). A similar strategy is successful in the alternative epistemic world of the global anti-vaccination movement (Carrion, 2018) and the persistence of flawed and questionable publications in the scientific record already poses significant problems for health research, policy, and lawmakers, and thus for society as a whole (Littell et al., 2024). Considering that a person’s support for “doing your own research” is associated with increased mistrust in scientific institutions (Chinn & Hasell, 2023), it will be of utmost importance to anticipate and consider such backfiring effects already when designing a technical solution, when suggesting industry or legal regulation, and in the planning of educational measures.

Recommendations

Solutions should be based on simultaneous considerations of technical, educational, and regulatory approaches, as well as incentives, including social ones, across the entire research infrastructure. Paying attention to how these approaches and incentives relate to each other can help identify points and mechanisms for disruption. Recognizing fraudulent academic papers must happen alongside understanding how they reach their audiences and what reasons there might be for some of these papers successfully “sticking around.” A possible way to mitigate some of the risks associated with GPT-fabricated scholarly texts finding their way into academic search engine results would be to provide filtering options for facets such as indexed journals, gray literature, peer-review, and similar on the interface of publicly available academic search engines. Furthermore, evaluation tools for indexed journals 3 Such as LiU Journal CheckUp, https://ep.liu.se/JournalCheckup/default.aspx?lang=eng . could be integrated into the graphical user interfaces and the crawlers of these academic search engines. To enable accountability, it is important that the index (database) of such a search engine is populated according to criteria that are transparent, open to scrutiny, and appropriate to the workings of  science and other forms of academic research. Moreover, considering that Google Scholar has no real competitor, there is a strong case for establishing a freely accessible, non-specialized academic search engine that is not run for commercial reasons but for reasons of public interest. Such measures, together with educational initiatives aimed particularly at policymakers, science communicators, journalists, and other media workers, will be crucial to reducing the possibilities for and effects of malicious manipulation or evidence hacking. It is important not to present this as a technical problem that exists only because of AI text generators but to relate it to the wider concerns in which it is embedded. These range from a largely dysfunctional scholarly publishing system (Haider & Åström, 2017) and academia’s “publish or perish” paradigm to Google’s near-monopoly and ideological battles over the control of information and ultimately knowledge. Any intervention is likely to have systemic effects; these effects need to be considered and assessed in advance and, ideally, followed up on.

Our study focused on a selection of papers that were easily recognizable as fraudulent. We used this relatively small sample as a magnifying glass to examine, delineate, and understand a problem that goes beyond the scope of the sample itself, which however points towards larger concerns that require further investigation. The work of ongoing whistleblowing initiatives 4 Such as Academ-AI, https://www.academ-ai.info/ , and Retraction Watch, https://retractionwatch.com/papers-and-peer-reviews-with-evidence-of-chatgpt-writing/ . , recent media reports of journal closures (Subbaraman, 2024), or GPT-related changes in word use and writing style (Cabanac et al., 2021; Stokel-Walker, 2024) suggest that we only see the tip of the iceberg. There are already more sophisticated cases (Dadkhah et al., 2023) as well as cases involving fabricated images (Gu et al., 2022). Our analysis shows that questionable and potentially manipulative GPT-fabricated papers permeate the research infrastructure and are likely to become a widespread phenomenon. Our findings underline that the risk of fake scientific papers being used to maliciously manipulate evidence (see Dadkhah et al., 2017) must be taken seriously. Manipulation may involve undeclared automatic summaries of texts, inclusion in literature reviews, explicit scientific claims, or the concealment of errors in studies so that they are difficult to detect in peer review. However, the mere possibility of these things happening is a significant risk in its own right that can be strategically exploited and will have ramifications for trust in and perception of science. Society’s methods of evaluating sources and the foundations of media and information literacy are under threat and public trust in science is at risk of further erosion, with far-reaching consequences for society in dealing with information disorders. To address this multifaceted problem, we first need to understand why it exists and proliferates.

Finding 1: 139 GPT-fabricated, questionable papers were found and listed as regular results on the Google Scholar results page. Non-indexed journals dominate.

Most questionable papers we found were in non-indexed journals or were working papers, but we did also find some in established journals, publications, conferences, and repositories. We found a total of 139 papers with a suspected deceptive use of ChatGPT or similar LLM applications (see Table 1). Out of these, 19 were in indexed journals, 89 were in non-indexed journals, 19 were student papers found in university databases, and 12 were working papers (mostly in preprint databases). Table 1 divides these papers into categories. Health and environment papers made up around 34% (47) of the sample. Of these, 66% were present in non-indexed journals.

Finding 2: GPT-fabricated, questionable papers are disseminated online, permeating the research infrastructure for scholarly communication, often in multiple copies. Applied topics with practical implications dominate.

The 20 papers concerning health-related issues are distributed across 20 unique domains, accounting for 46 URLs. The 27 papers dealing with environmental issues can be found across 26 unique domains, accounting for 56 URLs.  Most of the identified papers exist in multiple copies and have already spread to several archives, repositories, and social media. It would be difficult, or impossible, to remove them from the scientific record.

As apparent from Table 2, GPT-fabricated, questionable papers are seeping into most parts of the online research infrastructure for scholarly communication. Platforms on which identified papers have appeared include ResearchGate, ORCiD, Journal of Population Therapeutics and Clinical Pharmacology (JPTCP), Easychair, Frontiers, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineer (IEEE), and X/Twitter. Thus, even if they are retracted from their original source, it will prove very difficult to track, remove, or even just mark them up on other platforms. Moreover, unless regulated, Google Scholar will enable their continued and most likely unlabeled discoverability.

A word rain visualization (Centre for Digital Humanities Uppsala, 2023), which combines word prominences through TF-IDF 5 Term frequency–inverse document frequency , a method for measuring the significance of a word in a document compared to its frequency across all documents in a collection. scores with semantic similarity of the full texts of our sample of GPT-generated articles that fall into the “Environment” and “Health” categories, reflects the two categories in question. However, as can be seen in Figure 1, it also reveals overlap and sub-areas. The y-axis shows word prominences through word positions and font sizes, while the x-axis indicates semantic similarity. In addition to a certain amount of overlap, this reveals sub-areas, which are best described as two distinct events within the word rain. The event on the left bundles terms related to the development and management of health and healthcare with “challenges,” “impact,” and “potential of artificial intelligence”emerging as semantically related terms. Terms related to research infrastructures, environmental, epistemic, and technological concepts are arranged further down in the same event (e.g., “system,” “climate,” “understanding,” “knowledge,” “learning,” “education,” “sustainable”). A second distinct event further to the right bundles terms associated with fish farming and aquatic medicinal plants, highlighting the presence of an aquaculture cluster.  Here, the prominence of groups of terms such as “used,” “model,” “-based,” and “traditional” suggests the presence of applied research on these topics. The two events making up the word rain visualization, are linked by a less dominant but overlapping cluster of terms related to “energy” and “water.”

The bar chart of the terms in the paper subset (see Figure 2) complements the word rain visualization by depicting the most prominent terms in the full texts along the y-axis. Here, word prominences across health and environment papers are arranged descendingly, where values outside parentheses are TF-IDF values (relative frequencies) and values inside parentheses are raw term frequencies (absolute frequencies).

Finding 3: Google Scholar presents results from quality-controlled and non-controlled citation databases on the same interface, providing unfiltered access to GPT-fabricated questionable papers.

Google Scholar’s central position in the publicly accessible scholarly communication infrastructure, as well as its lack of standards, transparency, and accountability in terms of inclusion criteria, has potentially serious implications for public trust in science. This is likely to exacerbate the already-known potential to exploit Google Scholar for evidence hacking (Tripodi et al., 2023) and will have implications for any attempts to retract or remove fraudulent papers from their original publication venues. Any solution must consider the entirety of the research infrastructure for scholarly communication and the interplay of different actors, interests, and incentives.

We searched and scraped Google Scholar using the Python library Scholarly (Cholewiak et al., 2023) for papers that included specific phrases known to be common responses from ChatGPT and similar applications with the same underlying model (GPT3.5 or GPT4): “as of my last knowledge update” and/or “I don’t have access to real-time data” (see Appendix A). This facilitated the identification of papers that likely used generative AI to produce text, resulting in 227 retrieved papers. The papers’ bibliographic information was automatically added to a spreadsheet and downloaded into Zotero. 6 An open-source reference manager, https://zotero.org .

We employed multiple coding (Barbour, 2001) to classify the papers based on their content. First, we jointly assessed whether the paper was suspected of fraudulent use of ChatGPT (or similar) based on how the text was integrated into the papers and whether the paper was presented as original research output or the AI tool’s role was acknowledged. Second, in analyzing the content of the papers, we continued the multiple coding by classifying the fraudulent papers into four categories identified during an initial round of analysis—health, environment, computing, and others—and then determining which subjects were most affected by this issue (see Table 1). Out of the 227 retrieved papers, 88 papers were written with legitimate and/or declared use of GPTs (i.e., false positives, which were excluded from further analysis), and 139 papers were written with undeclared and/or fraudulent use (i.e., true positives, which were included in further analysis). The multiple coding was conducted jointly by all authors of the present article, who collaboratively coded and cross-checked each other’s interpretation of the data simultaneously in a shared spreadsheet file. This was done to single out coding discrepancies and settle coding disagreements, which in turn ensured methodological thoroughness and analytical consensus (see Barbour, 2001). Redoing the category coding later based on our established coding schedule, we achieved an intercoder reliability (Cohen’s kappa) of 0.806 after eradicating obvious differences.

The ranking algorithm of Google Scholar prioritizes highly cited and older publications (Martín-Martín et al., 2016). Therefore, the position of the articles on the search engine results pages was not particularly informative, considering the relatively small number of results in combination with the recency of the publications. Only the query “as of my last knowledge update” had more than two search engine result pages. On those, questionable articles with undeclared use of GPTs were evenly distributed across all result pages (min: 4, max: 9, mode: 8), with the proportion of undeclared use being slightly higher on average on later search result pages.

To understand how the papers making fraudulent use of generative AI were disseminated online, we programmatically searched for the paper titles (with exact string matching) in Google Search from our local IP address (see Appendix B) using the googlesearch – python library(Vikramaditya, 2020). We manually verified each search result to filter out false positives—results that were not related to the paper—and then compiled the most prominent URLs by field. This enabled the identification of other platforms through which the papers had been spread. We did not, however, investigate whether copies had spread into SciHub or other shadow libraries, or if they were referenced in Wikipedia.

We used descriptive statistics to count the prevalence of the number of GPT-fabricated papers across topics and venues and top domains by subject. The pandas software library for the Python programming language (The pandas development team, 2024) was used for this part of the analysis. Based on the multiple coding, paper occurrences were counted in relation to their categories, divided into indexed journals, non-indexed journals, student papers, and working papers. The schemes, subdomains, and subdirectories of the URL strings were filtered out while top-level domains and second-level domains were kept, which led to normalizing domain names. This, in turn, allowed the counting of domain frequencies in the environment and health categories. To distinguish word prominences and meanings in the environment and health-related GPT-fabricated questionable papers, a semantically-aware word cloud visualization was produced through the use of a word rain (Centre for Digital Humanities Uppsala, 2023) for full-text versions of the papers. Font size and y-axis positions indicate word prominences through TF-IDF scores for the environment and health papers (also visualized in a separate bar chart with raw term frequencies in parentheses), and words are positioned along the x-axis to reflect semantic similarity (Skeppstedt et al., 2024), with an English Word2vec skip gram model space (Fares et al., 2017). An English stop word list was used, along with a manually produced list including terms such as “https,” “volume,” or “years.”

• Artificial Intelligence
• / Search engines

Cite this Essay

Haider, J., Söderström, K. R., Ekström, B., & Rödl, M. (2024). GPT-fabricated scientific papers on Google Scholar: Key features, spread, and implications for preempting evidence manipulation. Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review . https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-156

• / Appendix B

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This research has been supported by Mistra, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research, through the research program Mistra Environmental Communication (Haider, Ekström, Rödl) and the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation [2020.0004] (Söderström).

Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

The research described in this article was carried out under Swedish legislation. According to the relevant EU and Swedish legislation (2003:460) on the ethical review of research involving humans (“Ethical Review Act”), the research reported on here is not subject to authorization by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (“etikprövningsmyndigheten”) (SRC, 2017).

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original author and source are properly credited.

Data Availability

All data needed to replicate this study are available at the Harvard Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/WUVD8X

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on the article manuscript as well as the editorial group of Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review for their thoughtful feedback and input.