US Literature - A Days Wait PDF

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Analysis of the short story “The Day’s Wait” by Ernest Hemmingway...

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Analysis of the short story “The Day’s Wait”

The short story „A Day’s Wait“ by Ernest Hemingway published 1968 is about a father who discovers that his 9-year-old boy, Schatz, suffers from influenza. The plot begins with Schatz entering his father’s room. He looks ill and his father calls a doctor for a diagnosis. The doctor takes the boy’s temperature, which turns out to be one hundred and two degrees. As long as Schatz’s temperature does not go over one hundred and four degrees, the boy and his father do not have anything to worry about. The doctor leaves three different types of medicine for the boy and leaves. After that, the father reads a story for Schatz, but he is not listening and staring fixedly at the foot of the bed. Moreover Schatz refuses to sleep and tells his father, that he doesn’t have to stay at his side all the time. It is a cold winter day and the father goes outside with his dog to hunt for quails. He shoots two and returns to the house where his boy Schatz still refuses to let anyone enter his room because he doesn’t want anyone to catch the flu just like he did. After his father takes his temperature again, which is still at one hundred and two degrees, the boy is still vacant. The father tries to read a story for Schatz again, but he is still not paying attention as before, which makes the father worry. He asks Schatz what’s wrong and Schatz reveals that he heard in France that people usually die with a body temperature above forty-four. His father explains him that the temperature in France is Celsius and not Fahrenheit. The boy who has been thinking that he would die relaxes and starts to complain again about little things. The short story deals with the typical Hemingway theme of inevitability of death (Evans). Even though Schatz is not really going to die, he believes that he is doomed. Thinking about death makes him hold back his emotions and control himself. The fledging boy seems to act more like an adult and wants his father to stay out of the room so that he will

not see him die. He also forbids anyone to enter his room, showing that he takes care of others even if it means that he has to die alone in his room. The misunderstanding between father and boy created a barrier between them. Both are talking about different things, which worsen the emotional situation of Schatz. It is clearly the fault of the father who does not communicate with his son or teach him about his health status. All that the son knows from the doctor and his father is that he has influenza and is going to be ok, but he of course thinks that they only say this to keep him calm until he dies. When Schatz says "You don´t have to stay in here with me, Papa, if it bothers you." (Hemingway 362, 9), he is talking about his death, but his father answers “It doesn’t bother me.” (Hemingway 362, 11), which probably shocks Schatz. In addition to that, father leaves the house to go hunting. The hunting scene is a parable for the relationship between the father and his son. The environment is frozen and it is very cold outside. The creek he walked on has a “glassy surface” (Hemingway 362, 21), which means that he could see something like an invisible wall under his feet. Just like the broken communication between him and his son the glassy surface shows the one side where the father his, not knowing that his son thinks he dies soon and his son on the other side, who thinks his father does not care about his ostensibly serious situation. The father and his dog fell twice on that glassy surface (Hemingway 362, 21), which is a metaphor for the fathers’ multiple failures. Even though his son gives clues about his mental situation, his father should pay attention to his ambiguous statements and answers, but he is too easily satisfied. The father describes his environment as a “bare ground […] vanished with ice” (Hemingway 362, 18), which is an imagery for the agony of Schatz as bare ground and the father’s mindless worsening of Schatz’s situation as ice which covers the ground. Whereas Schatz believes that he will not be alive the next day, his father spends his time with entertainment rather than with his son. He is having a good time while hunting and is happy that there are so many quails left for the other day.

“Schatz” is the German word for “darling” or “treasure”. This name for the father’s son doesn’t seem to match perfectly. Since we learn that Schatz knows something about influenza and the temperature required to die and that he got these information from his French schoolmates, one can assume that Schatz attends a boarding school and does not see his father often. Furthermore, the conversations between Schatz and his father show that his father does not have an intimate relationship to his son, because Schatz learned things from schoolmates and not from his father. The fact that he calls his sun treasure might also be a metaphor for the value his son has for him. The current condition of his son is bad, thus he might be of less value to the father, who rather goes hunting than taking care of his “lowvalue treasure”. The short story is written in first-person narrator from the father’s point of view. Hemingway uses this narrative perspective to build tension in the short story. The reader does not know what Schatz is thinking about until the very end of the story. When we are told that Schatz thought the whole time that he is going to die, we empathize with him and understand that he must have felt terribly. Since there seems to be a barrier between the father and his son and the father is the narrator, his reliability is questionably. In order to comprehend the reason for the distance between them, we cannot rely on the comments of the narrator who tries to convince the reader that Schatz is relaxed and the problem is solved. He says that his son “cried very easily at little things that were of no importance.” (Hemingway 363, 38). This comment is another evidence of the unreliability of the narrator, who obviously tries to convince the reader that Schatz is the childish boy again as he was before the misunderstandings, even though he cannot define what is important for a 9-year-old. Looking at Hemingway’s biography we can find parallels to the short story. He was wounded twice in World War I with severe injuries, thinking that he had to die. He expresses the feelings and his fear in that situation through the character Schatz (Gale).

Bibliography Evans, Sara. Wang, Bella ed. Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway; Hemingway as Existentialist. GradeSaver, 10 December 2010. Web. 12. May 2015 Hemingway, Ernest. “A Day’s Wait”. The First Forty-Nine Stories. London: Jonathan Cape. Print. 361-363. “Hemingway, Ernest.” Gale Contextual Encyclopedia of American Literature. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 2009. 721-726. Gale virtual Reference Library. Web. 12 May 2015...