Hemingway's stories

Death is the unavoidable end we all get to, it is the inevitable feeling of “nada”, omnipresent in Hemingway’s stories in which we perceive his true sense of death, in different forms.

The meaning of “nada”, In ‘A Clean Well-Lighted Place’, death is not physical but spiritual. The loneliness that the old waiter and the old man feel is represented as death. Unlike the young waiter, they don’t have anyone waiting at home for them, they are alone and the café stands as an image of light and cleanliness against the dark chaos. The old man and the old waiter don’t want to feel that loneliness, which is why they like going to places like a café where they find order and have company. The old waiter says: “I’m of those who like to stay late at the café… with all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night”. The old men and the old waiter have both lost their hopes and confidence. They feel like they have no one to share the rest of their lives with. They feel lonely, left behind. And the only way for them to keep those thoughts away is by sitting in a café, where there are other people and they don’t feel so miserable. We can realize that there is a relationship of brotherhood between the old waiter and the old man who feel the same way. The old waiter sympathizes with the old drinker of brandy because he is like him: of the kind that need the cleanliness, the light and company of other persons and unlike the young waiter who wants to go home because he knows that someone is waiting for him and he is impatient to get there. But he is only being selfish and has not the slightest conception of what it means for the old waiter and the old man to keep the café open which represents insulation against the dark.

In ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’, death is personified, as it approaches Harry: “He had just felt death come by again…It moved up closer to him…so its weight was all upon his chest”. In all the course of the story we can see Harry’s feeling about death. Now that he feels it, he understands the importance of his writing. As he married a wealthy woman, he didn’t feel the need of writing for a living anymore, and now, he regrets it. He knows that he won’t be able to write anymore, and he could have done it a long time ago and written about the things he liked. But it’s too late and he blames his wife for it. Worst of all are the memories of his past life. Liberty, opportunity and Integrity were the qualities which he once owned and now are irrecoverably lost. He was very obsessed with the idea of death and now that it was close, he had lost all curiosity about it. Now time was over and possessive death moves in. Harry has lost hope because he knows that death is waiting for him and he cannot do anything, and he now knows and is aware that he should have written what he liked when he could.

We can also perceive death-symbols like the vultures and the hyenas; the death-image transfers itself from the vultures to this other foul devourer of the dead. Harry finds without astonishment that the image of the hyena is slipping lightly along the edge of the emptiness. “Never believe any of that about the scythe and skull”.

In ‘Hills Like White Elephants’, we can not really see death, but we imagine it. Death is expressed in the future, in a decision. The future of the baby that Jig is carrying in her womb is decided by two people. She only has two options: to have an abortion or not. But if she decides to have the baby, she would put at risk her relationship with the man she loves at the beginning -because at the end, she realizes how selfish and immature he is and how they have a very shallow relationship. So death is the end of a relationship or the death of the baby.

In ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’, we can see Francis’ death, which is very ironic because he died happily, but all his life he was very miserable, tied to a woman who didn’t love him and who, in the end, kills him. But on the other hand, his death was a happy one because he realized he was not a coward anymore, and with that, he felt very powerful and exultant, although it lasted only for a few minutes. Francis must fight against his wife who does not want him to be self-confident because she is conscious of the consequences that it could have: he would leave her and she would not have the privileges she had for marrying a rich man. Francis must also struggle with his cowardliness which obstructs him from having the respect he deserves form his wife and his friends.

In ‘Now I Lay Me’, the Signor Tenente didn’t want to fall asleep because he was sure that when he did, death would come and take him. “I myself did not want to sleep because I had been living for a long time with the knowledge that if I ever shut my eyes in the dark and let myself go, my soul would go out of my body”. So he started to remember events on his past and he prayed for all the people he saw in that memory and when he finished praying for those people, only then there would be light and he could sleep. He was afraid of darkness which, in this case, represents death in ‘A Clean Well-Lighted Place’.

The way that Hemingway writes is extraordinary because he does not give all the information for the reader, but he makes you think and realize what he is trying to say. There is more to the iceberg than what we see on the surface. For me, it is amazing how he enters upon the theme of death because he mixes different views of it, which is, more importantly, the feeling of being lonely, the fear to have no one waiting for us at home, no one who cares about us or having no one to share our life with. That is a kind of death: not death itself but the feeling we have of being alone in the world.