A Story I Loved: "A Day's Wait" by Ernest Hemingway
- Staff Writer
- Aug 31
- 2 min read
A great Hemingway short story. It’s very simple, but it encapsulates for me very simply what Hemingway’s core themes are- real and perceived responsibility, real and perceived masculinity. It’s a rather sweet story, about a father and a boy who comes down with a fever. The father tells him his temperature is 102- and the boy panics, because he’d heard that a temperature of 102 would be fatal. (He’d be right, if they were thinking in Celsius.) He spends the whole day, stoic, until finally he tells his father that he has been believing he is going to die. The father responds by correcting the misunderstanding. The last sentence is great, “The hold over himself relaxed too, finally, and the next day it was very slack and he cried very easily at little things that were of no importance.”
Hemingway makes you watch everything from the outside. It's so interesting to see what he does with "iceberg theory"- his belief that everything about a good short story lies just under the surface of his language. It's why I love his short stories, although his novels are fine as well, because his short stories push this kind of literary thinking to the very limit. You see it everywhere- in his most famous short stories, in the Nick Adams catalogue, and on and on. He lived it, breathed it. He truly believed in it. He created this way of writing, that so many lit students and fiction writers have tried to nail down in the years passing his absence, but he, of course, does it best. So much, an entire world, of childhood, innocence, maturity, passes between the first sentence and the last, even though we get so little from the character's heads.
That's the mark of good writing. We don't have the boy spelling everything out- his terror, his relief. We can feel the sheer force of it just from a few sentences- the indication of how deeply everything was felt by how much he seems to savor his life and miss it in the day following. I highly recommend Hemingway for this reason, at least, just to watch how sentences work, how to write work that isn't dogmatic. Show, not tell, is probably the easiest way to say it, and it's a good adage for a reason. He's kind of extreme, as he was about most things, but he's entirely sincere. And he's right. It works, very effectively.
Resources:
Read "A Day's Wait" here:
