Short Story Club (1): The Killers by Ernest Hemingway

Thank you. I've gave you rep.

What does everyone think of Anderson's acceptance of his coming death at the end of the story?

 

You mean Andreson?

 

I did. :redface: Sorry, my mistake. It's been fixed.

 

He obviously expects it. There is the whole thing about him lying in bed, it is not normal, the landlady thinks he is sick, but he isn't.

The strange way he says "The only thing is...I just can't make up my mind to go out. I been in here all day." Presumably he knows they are coming, and that they will get him when he goes out? He has decided he can't avoid being killed, but making the decision to be go out and be killed, that is a tough one! "There ain't anything to do. After a while I'll make up my mind to go out."

 

I find it strange. Even if the odds are overwhelming wouldn't he try and so something desperate? Running away?

 

That's the Hemingwayesque thing about this. He's done with running. Clearly, he tried that and they found him anyway. Now there's nothing for him but to face what's coming to him, and he's kind of trying to work himself up to the point where he can do that. Hemingway is portraying Ole's resignation to his fate and Nick's reaction to it. Nick is young, hopeful still, and he doesn't like the idea of just waiting to be killed. That's why he wants to get out of town, and that's why George tells him not to think about it.

 

He has accepted his fate. And by saying that he'll go out when he feels like it suggests that he has a false sense of power. I think he strongly believes that he is still in control of his life. This ties in nicely to his profession as a boxer and the power dynamic that goes on between two boxers in the ring.

I know some interpretations say that Andreson pissed off a mobster by throwing a match. Quite honestly, I don't see much evidence to support that. But like I said before, this story isn't about Andreson; it's about Nick Adams.

 

I agree with thirdwind. It's as if Hemingway manipulated Andreson into the situation he's in just to confront Nick Adams with it, to see how Nick reacts and how it forces him to grow up and deal with some of the uglier sides of this world. I know about Hemingway's iceberg theory, but he hadn't really mastered it in this story, IMO. He left too much out. I think the story would have been stronger with just a little more of Nick's reaction at the end. Maybe if the dialogue with George had been a couple of lines longer - not much, just a couple of lines.

 

In a short story, they say that word usage is important and to make every word count. I wonder why Henry's is run by George and Hirsch's is run by Bell. Seems a lot is opposite in this story.

Henry's is run by George
Hirsch's is run by Mrs. Bell.
The fighter gives up.
The responsible adult is apathetic.
The cook is the smartest person.
The killers don't kill anyone.

I dunno, there must be a meaning beind the madness.

 

It seems to me everyone accept their fate and their role in the play in an almost stoic way except Nick.

If you think about the first part George is faced by two customers that's rude and he seems to play along. His objection "Where do you think you are" isn't followed up further and Sam the cook is first described as the n* and that even becomes his epithet. To me that means he too is confined to accepting his role.

 

These are well spotted, JJ. I think the two that are most significant are that the fighter doesn't fight and the killers don't kill. It may have been a tenet of modernism that more traditional ideas of heroism are rejected, and the young Hemingway may have been caught up in that, too. So there are no traditional heroes or villains in this story; there's just realistic mediocrity and ugliness. That's what shakes Nick and makes him want to leave town - he's still young enough to believe in romantic ideas of heroism. But he sees the killers boast without backing it up, and he sees the fighter already defeated, and he feels betrayed.

It's interesting that Hemingway abandoned this kind of thinking later (and not very much later) in his career. Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls is heroic in a more traditional sense, as is Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea.

 

George and Sam seem old enough and experienced enough in life to know the killers are potentially dangerous. It may be that there's no follow-up to "Where do you think you are?" because nobody wants anybody to get angry and make a mess. George and Sam just play it cool and wait for the killers to leave.

 

To add to what minstrel wrote, I'm sure Hemingway's rejection of the traditional/romanticized hero had to do a lot with his experiences with WWI (in fact, you could argue that without WWI, there would be no modernism). I remember reading an essay a long time ago about WWI and its effect on literature. The author argued that modernist writers rejected the external world after witnessing the horrors of WWI and turned to the internal world (stream of consciousness, interior monologue). The author gave several examples of how modernism really took off after 1920. There's no doubt that Hemingway, who moved to Paris in 1920, was influenced by this way of thinking to some degree.

 

I'm going to admit here that this is the first time I've read anything by Hemmingway, and I don't know much about ^. But I was interested in the lack of description, and how there was a lot of dialogue. It moved the story along at a fast pace. Sometimes authors get stuck in long-winded descriptions and by the time we get back to the events I'm like, "where were we?" Instead Hemmingway never breaks the flow of the story, using simple, short sentences.

As for Hemmingway's calling Sam a nigger, it didn't seem rascist to me, but just like another way of identifying him. Just as he was sometimes called by name and sometimes "the cook". These were the obvious qualities about him that told him apart from the other characters, which you can understand without the need for a lot of description, which was not provided.

I was thrown off by the sudden ending though. I was like, "What, is there a link to another page, or something?" I've noticed the same sudden endings in Poe's stories. It kind of feels like he's broken off in the middle of telling the story and not come back to finish up. Was this just typical of stories written way back when?

 

Nope. It's just the way Hemingway decided to end the story. Since he was still young when he wrote it, I think he was trying to emulate how Chekhov ended his stories (since Chekhov was, and still is, one of the masters of the form). It didn't work too well here IMO, but it certainly didn't ruin the story for me.

 

It didn't ruin the story for me either, I actually kind of like stories that are left hanging, but I can understand the frustration. Sometimes you just want closure, but with the minimalist style Hemingway was going for (and succeed with, in all honesty) a long, continuous story just wouldn't have worked as well I don't think.

I've never read Chekhov though, but heard so much about him ... damn, another name on my 'to read' list.

 

Hopefully we'll get to read and discuss one of his stories in the near future.

 

Heh, that would actually be awesome.

 

I read somewhere that in the 19th century, short stories forked off into two directions. There was the traditional, Nathaniel Hawthorne / Edgar Allan Poe story, in which all the necessary action is onstage, so to speak, and there's a traditional beginning-middle-end structure, and then there was the Chekhov story, in which plot is secondary, structure is not a consideration, and the whole point is what Joyce called "epiphany," that is to say, a sudden revealing of a previously-unseen truth. Chekhov influenced Joyce and Katherine Mansfield, and they in turn influenced Hemingway and everyone who came after him. Given Chekhov's importance as a short story writer, I think we MUST read and discuss a story or two of his. It'll help us know what we're doing.

 

I didn't mean that I thought it ruined the story. But it would have been helpful to have "the end".

 

I like the way Hemingway immediately sketches his characters, the scene and the tone of the story. He has a firm hand without overuse of words.

The tough guys are immediately sketched.

There's smart talk:

"You were in a kosher convent. That's where you were."

It's clever the way he brings in other views and details more of the locale:

"I'd better go up the street," the motorman said.

The n- person was personalized, similarly as all the early American writers personalized blacks, only using the n- word because their consciousness at the time did not allow any other kind of generalization. Being black myself, that's how I see it. In a short story I hope to post here, I finally had to use the n- word as used by rappers. This has been a serious and personal issue with me over the course of my life. But older now, as I senior, I just don't care anymore.

Period piece, many of you say? But for a few word changes, clothes, it still stands today. Note the menu items. How would you change the following - easy:

"...pass under the arc-light and across the street. In their tight overcoats and derby hats they looked like a vaudeville team."

You you say they looked like a rock-a-billy team, some tough rappers, x-rated comics, anything, your choice. No problem with the lights.

I like this original sketch:

“The cook felt the corners of his mouth with his thumbs.”

And then the cook remarked:

""Little boys always know what they want to do," he said."

Was that comment from the typical person deemed hated with the appellation n-? No, don't think so. It was a critical comment made to the face of familiar people.

Simple clear street directions:

"Nick walked up the street beside the car-tracks and turned at the next arc-light down a side-street. Three houses up the street was Hirsch's rooming-house. Nick walked up the two steps and pushed the bell. A woman came to the door."

The simple but important summation of Ole Andreson's fate that implies a lot of story -

"No. I got in wrong."

Notice the implied action on the positioning of the woman landlady. Hemingway sveltely positions-moves her:

"I'm sorry he don't feel well," the woman said. "He's an awfully nice man. He was in the ring, you know."
"I know it."
"You'd never know it except from the way his face is," the woman said. They stood talking just inside the street door. "He's just as gentle."

The story was tight and it worked well for me. Note the success of Hemingway's novels written with the same clear style. Ah, he remains a true lesson. Thanks for choosing it.