Howard Pyle Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Susan F. Beegel

Critical Essay by Susan F. Beegel

SOURCE: "Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates and Male Taciturnity in Hemingway's 'A Day's Wait'," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 30, No. 4, Fall, 1993, pp. 535-41.

In the following essay, Beegel argues that the presence of Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates in Ernest Hemingway's short story "A Day's Wait" is significant because it serves as a subtext for what Beegel believes is really a story critical of male stoicism.

Beyond the long arm of the Law,
Close to a shipping road,
Pirates in their island lairs
Observe the pirate code.

—W. H. Auden, "Islands"

The plot of "A Day's Wait" is deceptively simple. A young boy with influenza hears that his temperature is 102 degrees and mistakes the Fahrenheit reading for Centigrade, in which a temperature of 44 degrees is invariably fatal. The boy, called Schatz, spends a day bravely waiting to die before his father discovers and corrects...
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