Vaudeville philosophers: "The Killers." - short story by Ernest Hemingway

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1999 by Ron Berman

George laughed.

"You don't have to laugh," Max said to him. "You don't have to laugh at all, see?"

"All right," said George.

"So he thinks it's all right." Max turned to Al. "He thinks it's all right. That's a good one."

"Oh, he's a thinker," Al said. They went on eating. (281)

The fundamental breach of decorum is for the rube to laugh - after all, he is the joke, not the audience for it. A more serious violation: George is guilty of thinking that anything in the world is "all right." And of wanting "to know what it's all about." He is guilty of being an American after the age of idealism.

There is a splendid remark in Henry E May's history of thought about the prewar years: progressive idealists were destined to disappear as an intellectual force because "two things seemed to bother them in the world of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner: real frivolity and real pessimism" (396). They never understood Hemingway, but he certainly understood them. They represented to him the imposition of morality and politics on criticism and literature. The world he understood was tragic, not idealistic. It can to some extent be understood through its opposites. For example, in "The Killers" we see a world of small-town loyalties and, in some ways, even of heroism. More important, as a brief, sharp, and deeply philosophical passage shows, it is a world understood through certainties:

"What's the idea?" Nick asked.

"There isn't any idea." (281)

This might indicate a philosophical problem in any system, and it has to be understood within and opposed to an American tradition of thought. American idealism and the public philosophy had the deepest concern for grounding action on logical belief. Recent American philosophy had become known for certain kinds of essays on the order of personal and social life: "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (Charles Sanders Peirce); "Loyalty to Loyalty, Truth, and Reality" (Josiah Royce); and "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" (William James). There was, one hoped, or should be such an order. In the last of these social statements, we see what George and Nick wish to believe: "ordinary men . . . imagine an abstract moral order in which the objective truth resides" (James, "Moral Philosopher" 148).

Nick, George, and Sam are ordinary men with an a priori sense of objective truth. They have never examined their own premises because daily life rarely makes one do that. But this story forces them not only to become conscious of their beliefs but also to change those beliefs. It forces them to change their idea of logic, which is in some ways a harder task than changing ideas about morality. Much of Hemingway's best work is built around questions that force issues. In this story, the questions are of two kinds, tactical and epistemological, both verging on the metaphysical. The tactical questions are about time and the menu, about obeying irrational orders, about going to the movies. There are more than 50 such tactical questions in this story. But they edge into questions of a different order of magnitude, about the nature of things social and universal, about awareness of reality, about the fully human condition. The literature of the first quarter of the century was famous for such questions. Here are some of them as phrased by Josiah Royce: "What do we live for? What is our duty? What is the true ideal of life? What is the true difference between right and wrong? What is the true good which we all need?" (2: 864). Not only are these answerable questions in Royce, but answering them is itself a moral activity. The opposite is true in Hemingway, who warns us here and elsewhere that these questions are so difficult - so unreal - that we ought not to think about them. Or, as Sam the cook says in a parable of another sort of wisdom, "You better not have anything to do with it at all" (286). Sam, who is underrated, is intellectually ahead of Nick and George.