In “The Killers,” by Ernest Hemingway, Nick informs Ole Andreson that some men were planning on killing him. Instead of reacting like Nick thought he would, Ole only remarks, “there isn’t anything I can do about it” (287). When Nick says, “Maybe it was just a bluff,” Ole tells him “No. It ain’t just a bluff.” Obviously Ole and Nick have very different points of view. While Nick is an example of someone who lives in fear of death, Hemingway has created Ole to be a person who knows that death is a reality but will not resign himself to being controlled by his fear of death. If Ole reacted strongly to Nick’s warning and immediately made plans to run away, he would be giving in to his fear of death and letting it stop him from living his life normally and peacefully. Instead of letting this happen, Ole acts as if nothing is different, allowing him to be unchanged by his fear. This, Hemingway believes, is a strong quality to have. By fearing death, Nick would be considered by Hemingway to be flawed.
“Indian Camp,” another short story by Hemingway, also shows Nick’s view and fear of death. After seeing an American Indian commit suicide, Nick asks his father about death.
“Is dying hard, Daddy?”
“No, I think it’s pretty easy, Nick. It all depends.”
They were seated in the boat, Nick in the stern, his father rowing. The sun was coming up over the hills. A bass jumped, making a circle in the water. Nick trailed his hand in the water. It felt warm in the sharp chill of the morning.
In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die. (21)
At the end of this story, Nick has experienced death, and he certainly must know that everyone must die. However, he feels that somehow he will not die. This can be explained by the fact that Nick greatly fears death—the antithesis of what Hemingway believes to be correct and honorable behavior—because Nick must fear death so greatly that he pushes all thoughts of it from his head and acts like it doesn’t exist for him. His fear of death is also apparent from how he asks his father “Is dying hard, Daddy?” That he would ask is dying is hard shows that he anticipates death to be a terrible and difficult thing, and he asks his father, whom he trusts and loves, for comfort from the alien idea of death.
“Indian Camp,” in addition, demonstrates another aspect of Hemingway’s writing: the subordination of women. Most of the story centers on Nick’s father helping an American Indian woman birth a baby, performing a caesarian section. Nick’s father turns childbirth, a job that is identified with women, into an operation which women depend on men for help with. When Nick, his father, and his uncle George arrive, Hemingway writes that “Inside on a wooden bunk lay a young Indian woman. She had been trying to have her baby for two days. All the old women in the camp had been helping her” (17). A job that could not be done by “all the old women in the camp” is achieved by a single man, Nick’s father, clearly showing that Hemingway believes women to not be as useful or capable as men. During the actual operation, the woman is restrained and treated as if operating on her is the same as operating on any farm animal.
Later when he started to operate Uncle George and three Indian men held the woman still. She bit Uncle George on the arm and Uncle George said, “Damn squaw bitch!” and the young Indian who had rowed Uncle George over laughed at him. (18)
In both Uncle George’s and Hemingway’s minds, the woman is just a “damn squaw bitch,” who is treated as more of a troublesome problem who is making it harder to perform the operation on her than as a person who is in severe mental and physical stress. During the entire trip, Nick’s dad treats his work as simply a job that needs to be done, and not a kind deed of assisting people who need their help. This is shown in the way he describes the list of steps and preparations he must make to Nick very methodically, like telling someone a recipe. He hardly mentions to Nick what stress the woman was under, simply calling the childbirth “exceptional.”
In “Hills Like White Elephants” one too sees women portrayed as subordinate to men. The general premise of the story is that a man is trying to convince a woman to have an abortion. Throughout the story, Hemingway refers to the male character as “the man,” and the female character as “the girl.” Giving the female character a more diminutive name is one manifestation of Hemingway’s belief that females are inferior.
“It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,” the man said. “It’s not really an operation at all.”
The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.
“I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig. It’s really not anything. It’s just to let the air in.”
The girl did not say anything. (3)
Here the man is trying to convince the girl to have an abortion. The girl isn’t saying anything, intimidated by the emotional pressure he is placing on her. (“If I do it you won’t every worry?” “I won’t worry about that because it’s perfectly simple.”) Instead of having the girl voice her opinion like the man, Hemingway writes for her to keep silent, like he believes women should be.
While “Hills Like White Elephants” makes use of dialogue for almost the entire story, the first chapter of A Farewell to Arms is completely devoid of dialogue. In it, Hemingway once again writes about death, but he gives it only a mention in the last sentence, the rest of the chapter is about the scenery in which the story takes place. “At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army.” Hemingway doesn’t write very long about the death due to cholera because he feels that one should not focus on one’s fear of death and worsen one’s life because of it. This is expressed in the passage by the brevity with which the narrator mentions death. Seven thousand deaths is a lot, but the narrator still holds himself about an irrational fear of it.
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