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

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1999 by Ron Berman

Both Wilson and Hemingway developed this idea as a conscious part of the not-especially loyal philosophical opposition. They understood that the relationship of reality to idea was that of perception to composition. They knew what they opposed: Dewey "insisted that the world was a world of meaning, not just a world of flatly unintelligible cause and effect connections." It is impossible to understand "The Killers" without reference to that (supposed) fact. However, when we posit order or nonpointlessness in the world, "it is we who are doing all the intellectual work" (Ryan 127). Max and Al know this; George and Sam and Nick must become painfully educated.

There are few other works of fiction in which meanings are so impacted. A single word implies heroism, as when George, who is asked if Ole Andreson eats here, simply says "sometimes" and risks his own life (283). The word afterward means the difference between life and death. "They're all right" (285) is nothing less than a special dispensation: it means that George and Nick and Sam will all stay alive because Max knows that they have become realists. George gets the exit line, a tube who has become a straight man: "you better not think about it" (289).

The last line of the story may not be Heidegger, but it is definitely philosophy. It ought to be read against an important passage about American provincial life in Royce, in which we are told that "all of us first learned about what we ought to do, about what our ideal should be, and in general about the moral law" from "our teachers, our parents, our playmates, society, custom, or perhaps some church." But belief does not matter because of its source alone. It remains for us to validate it: "What reason can I give why my duty is my duty?" What makes us human is not what is handed down but the way the mind works under pressure to "furnish the only valid reason for you to know what is fight and good" (2: 864-65). That is what Nick and George and Sam are asked to deny, and what Max and Al conclude they will deny.

In the single best-known statement of recent American philosophy, Pragmatism, William James had referred to a notorious crime involving murder and suicide. He understood plainly that this was both a philosophical and a religious issue. James cited the reaction of a drastically empiricist mind that saw in this crime "one of the elemental stupendous facts of this modern world' that "cannot be glozed over or minimized away by all the treatises on God, and Love, and Being, helplessly existing in their monumental vacuity" (Writings 500). Such crimes or existential facts, James writes, constitute a "dilemma" for the American mind, whose sense of the verities of daily life is based on intangibles and unprovables.

The governing "idea" of the town of Summit is typical of small towns in the mid-20s, and was evident in the best-known of them all: the assumption that "the world is good, God is good, and His spirit wherein men are to live is love's spirit" becomes embodied in "an elaborate system of beliefs, prohibitions, and group-sanctioned conduct." But even inside Middletown we are always aware that some of the beliefs of this system are impossible to accept literally, "without lying to yourself" (Lynd 316, 330).