Ain T A Cloud In The Rain Symbolism

The grandmother’s hat is the first symbol that serves to portray her as a lady with a misguided moral code. When she prepares for the trip with fellow family members, she dresses in the manner the authors suggests she is prepared for an accident and wants the people viewing her dead body to see it as that of a lady. The grandmother is less concerned about the fact that she will already be dead and maybe her grandchildren will also be dead. What is of more concern to her is being viewed as a lady which reveals her moral conviction and selfishness. When she is involved in an accident, the hat falls apart and thus shows her moral beliefs have fallen apart too. Her conception as a lady dissolves when she is thrown from the car and the brim of the hat falls.
The symbol is evident when John Wesley and June Star start a mind game by choosing a cloud in order to offer guesses on what its shape looked like. The family journey begins with a full cloud sky. The sky here is a container of thoughts and the clouds represent blindness, misinterpreted meaning, and blockage of thoughts. In the grandmother's mind, the “clouds” are preventing her from seeing the “sun” another symbol of truth and reality. 'Ain't a cloud in the sky,' he remarked, looking up at it. 'Don't see no sun but don't see no cloud neither.'" Later, when the family encounters the Misfit, the sky is clear and thus there is no blindness of mind, but there is no sunlight which shows that truth is absent too. This symbolizes an empty state of mind for the grandmother when she is in trouble. There is no blindness, no light and thus total emptiness in her school of