The Killers by Ernest Hemingway
"The Killers" by Ernest Hemingway is a story based upon Hemingway's view of the big city in the late 1920's. During the era of prohibition whoever controlled the flow of alcohol controlled the city. Unfortunately, the police were powerless against man thirst for booze. The Mafia also expanded into the bookie field, and if someone didn't pay up or double crossed the Mafia they were taken out. Hemingway was unfamiliar with this city scene and we can see a very strong correlation between him and one of his characters, Nick Adams. Nick was a newcomer to the city, completely unfamiliar with the boldness of disregard for the law that was present. The Theme that I feel Hemingway is trying to convey is how much corruption and disregard for the law there was in the late 1920's.
The plot of this story primarily consists of an attempted murder that takes place in a lunchroom diner. The diner itself plays an important role in the setting of the story. It gives us insight into the lives of two of the customers, Nick Adams and Ole Anderson. When we ask ourselves what type of a person would have gone to a diner in the late 1920's, it reminds us of the common, single, working man. This is also the type of person who would be more susceptible to making a bet with a
bookie, throwing a fight for a bet, or even making some other sort of deal with the Mafia. The town in which the diner is located in also plays an important task in giving the killers an underlying importance. This underlying importance displays an early dominance from these two characters. "The backdrop to the action in the 'The Killers' is a static, conventional town that, like the universe in which the killers operate, is colorless and pa...
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...s with the idea of conformity, having everyone just go with the flow. His personal opinion is that of Nick, not wanting to see such disregard for the law go unpunished, yet he is surrounded with people who just want to mind their own business.
Bibliography:
· Brooks, Cleanth Jr. and Warren, Robert Penn. "The Killer's." Understanding Fiction. New York: F.S. Croft and Company. 1944. 344-350
· Geimer, Roger. "The Killer's." MasterPlots II: Short Story Criticism. Ed. Frank N. Magill. Vol. 3. Pasadena: Salem, 1986. 1259-1261
· Hemingway, Ernest. "The Killer's." Detective Fiction Crime and Compromise. Ed. Allen, Dick and Chacko, David. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1974. 12-19
· Houston, Neal B. "Hemingway's Nervous Killers". 25-28
· Taube, Myron. "The Nada and Plato's Cave." College English Association Critic. May. 1964: 5-7
Truman Capote establishes respect and trust in what he writes from with audience, ethos, through the use of an extensive variety of facts and statistics, logos. Capote uses so many dates, times, and other facts about the crime committed in the book and the subsequent investigation that the reader has to believe what the author is writing. The use of all these facts shows that Capote did his research and he interviewed, questioned, and obtained the opinions of every person that even slightly important to crime itself and the investigation/trial. The author is obviously very meticulous when it comes to dates and times; every important event in the book has a date and sometimes even a time of day to go with it. Some examples of dates included were the day of the murders (November 15th, 1959), dates of when Perry and Dick were here or there (December 31th, 1959- a small restaurant in Texas or noon on December 25th, 1959- beach in Miami Florida), date when the two criminals were apprehended (January 1st, 1960), dates when they were brought from this prison to that one and finally when they were brought to death’s row (April, 1960). Other small facts are also used by the author, like facts about the criminal’s early lives or experiences that they had, which could only have been obtained through extensive interviews with Perry and Dick. The use of all these logos by Capote establishes strong ethos, showing the reader that the author did more than enough research to show that he has the knowledge to write a whole book on the subject.
On a cold Halloween night in 1963, in the film Halloween, a six-year-old boy named Michael Myers was seen stabbing his older sister to death with a gigantic kitchen knife then leaving to stand outside the house with a blank expression on his face. As a result he was sent to Smith Grove’s Mental Hospital which he escapes from 15 years later to go after 17 year old Laurie Strode and her friends Lynda and Annie. Warshow’s essay, The Gangster as Tragic Hero, depicts American society’s need to show public cheerfulness and maintain a positive morale as well as its desire for something more sinister, something more brutal. This desire to indulge in the forbidden fruit of sadism and cruelty is what makes the gangster persona so appealing to the nation. He is the man of the city. He emerges from the crowd as a successful outlaw and his only aspiration is success through brutality.
Throughout his nonfiction novel In Cold Blood, Truman Capote continuously contrasts the kindheartedness and innocence of the Clutters to the malicious, manipulative demeanor of Dick Hickock and Perry Smith to emphasize the cold, cruel nature of their crime. By harshly interrupting peaceful, endearing images of Nancy Clutter baking a pie with descriptions of Dick and Perry planning the town darling’s very murder, Capote consistently juxtaposes good and evil. His tactic descriptions of the seemingly discordant yet parallel occurrences in different settings and employment of strong imagery and pathos throughout the novel prove effective in not only developing characterization and appealing to the reader’s emotions but building the contrast between good and evil that
Dubus, Andre. "Killings." Meyer, Michael. In The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 107 - 120.
‘Hills Like White Elephants’ is a short story authored by Ernest Hemingway about an American and a girl named Jig. In the story, the two are sitting in a train station waiting for the train to Madrid. While they wait, they have an intense ongoing debate on whether or not to abort Jig. At the end of the story, the train is about to arrive and the man carries luggage on the tracks as they prepare to leave. The end of the story does not clearly define the outcome of its decision. She said I feel good at the end of the story - happiness is a central theme of the story, but we wonder if she went through with the operation. The paper discusses the manner in which symbolism has been employed in the story to communicate about an abortion, the couple is considering to go through.
Hills like White Elephants is a unique story filled with simple yet meaningful dialogue between two lovers in Spain. The entire story can leave the audience with more questions rather than answers when they reach the conclusion. Those who are familiar with Hemmingway and have studied his works have attempted to gain insight and logical conclusions to many of his stories by examining his life. A life that was full of married affairs, alcohol, and hardship. Many of these experiences Hemmingway has faced, have set the foundation for some of his greatest works. This paper will examine the impact that Hemmingway’s first born child, his alcohol addiction and his separation from Pauline had on the popular short story of Hills like White Elephants.
Pike, Gerald. “Excerpts from Criticism of the Works of Short Fiction Writers.” Short Story Criticism. Ed. Thomas Votteler. Vol. 6. Detroit: Gale Research International Limited, 1990. 90. Print.
American Psycho is a savage account of a wealthy investment banker in the late 80s that commits heinous acts of murder, rape, and torture. Although on the surface, American Psycho seems as though it is just another horror story, it actually has a much deeper message. This story is a harsh critique of a superficial Wall Street society in the late 80s that was rampant with materialism and greed. This is the society in which the main character Patrick Bateman lives–where appearance, material possessions, and status define a person. This superficial existence leaves him hollow and dead inside and turns him into a psychopathic killer. A society such as this, devoid of any morality, inevitably creates psychopaths such as Bateman. The film shows an excellent portrayal of a vacant, nihilistic killer with no feelings or emotions. However, there is something more to the story that the film did not quite capture. The book seems to not only be a satirical take on this society, but a tragedy as well. Recreating the dinner scene with his secretary Jean shows that underneath the surface Patrick Bateman is, indeed, a human being with real feelings and emotions, and that it is a great tragedy that this superficial society has turned him into a monster.
"We have to start treating Vietnam as a country and not a war. It'll take the old age and death of all veterans before it stops being our 51st state (Alvarez, 2013)." In the story "The Man I Killed", Tim O'Brien, who served in the U.S military in Vietnam, describes the guilt many American soldiers felt about the atrocities they committed in Vietnam. "Vietnam is not an appendage of America. That sort of thinking got us into the mess in the first place. Were bound together by some painful history, but it’s not our liver or our appendix- it's a country (Alvarez, 2013)."
Magill, Frank N. ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series. Vol 5 Pru-Ter. California: Salem Press, Inc. 1986.
He kills his father after slapping the cornflakes out of his hands just like his father did to him. While the hit man is in his twenties having fun, his mother is in the hospital dying of cancer. The fact that T.C Boyle puts the line “The priest wears black. So does the hit man.” means something. It means that both life and death or good and bad are both sides of the same coin. Both of them go hand and hand. They’re both messengers of something greater. The hit man’s first job, which we don’t find out till later, was to kill this one guy’s cousin. He then tells us he doesn’t like peas which was a foreshadowing of the waitress’s death. The hit man then attends a talk show which is really him talking to god and his angels. The whole description of the place and how the pediatrician has to deal with all the children (which is us) made it seem to be like god talking to death. The pun at the end, “Tell me - I’ve always wanted to know – what does it feel like to hit someone?” was just to make it funny. Later on when the hit man gave a wino $1800 then killed him meant that the wino used all his money on drugs which killed him. The hit man getting married, having a kid, going to work, and greeting his neighbors is all part of creating the sense of humanity in him. The fire, the 3 headed dog, and getting a gilded scythe is all part of making him seem like the reaper or something of that nature. At the end when he’s
Rpt. in Short Story Criticism. Ed. Joseph Palmisano. Vol.
In the nonfiction novel, “In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote, the author tells a story of the murderers and victims of a slaughter case in Holcomb, Kansas. Instead of writing a book on the murder case as a crime report, the author decides to write about the people. The people we learn about are the killers, Dick and Perry, and the murdered family, the Clutters. The author describes how each family was and makes the portrayals of Dick and Perry’s family different from the Clutters.The portrayal of the Clutters and of Dick and Perry’s families, was used to describe what the American Dream was for each character. In the beginning we learn about what type of family the Clutters were and how they represented the American Dream for the people of Holcomb.
Royko, Mike. “Death to the Killers.” Patterns Plus: A Short Prose Reader with Argumentation, Fifth Edition. Ed. Mary Lou Conlin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1995. 353-356. Print.
When attempting to explain the conditions Myers' lives in, straightforward, realistic statements are usually the most effective way to do so. "Near my house in the 1990s we had drive-by killings, run-by killings, sneak-up killings, gunfights and battles, car chases. We had drug killings, vengeance killings, the killing of witnesses to other crimes, accidental killings, and killings that enforce values we can only vaguely fathom" (73). Myers' illustrates the violence he sees on a daily basis, which allows someone like myself, who comes from a small suburban town and is not familiar with killings of any sort, to better understand the nature of the violence he is describing. It is a very bold statement that sets the tone of the essay, for this type of violence is common to Myers and is something he has become accustomed to. For those of us who are lucky enough to live in areas sheltered from violence and death, there is a need for outside sources to make us aware of the condition of the world around us.