A Day's Wait by Ernest Hemingway

A Day's Wait

                                                  

“A Day’s Wait” short story is written by Ernest Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway belongs to America and he has received the prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature.

"A Day's Wait" (1936) is a brief story that portrays a tragic outcome of miscommunication between a boy and his father. Schatz is a nine-year-old boy who becomes sick one winter night. A doctor is called, the doctor diagnosis that Schatz has flu and a high fever. The doctor leaves medicine for the boy and tells the father that the boy's temperature is 102 degrees. Schatz overhears it and that causes conflict and misunderstanding between the boy and his father.

The father reads stories to Schatz from Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates. While doing it the father observes that the boy does not follow the story; instead he stares at the book and feels detached. Schatz asks his father to leave if sitting with him bothers the father. He again and again pesters his father to leave. Thinking that the boy feels dizzy due to medication, the father leaves for a walk along with an Irish settler on the frozen creek. The dog flushes a covey of quail, and the father kills two. He returns happily from hunting and knows that his son does not allow anyone to enter into the room.

When the father enters, Schatz stops him by telling that the father may get what he was having. The father leaves the son’s comment unnoticed and takes his temperature. The boy demanded his father to reveal the temperature. When the father tells it is around 100 and nothing to worry about it, the boy replies that he does not bother. At the same time he cannot keep himself free from thinking about it. While advising the son to take it easy, the father observes that the boy is trying to withhold something. Finally Schatz asks his father that at what time is he going to die? Now the father understands what has bothered his son till then. He calls him silly and tells that people will not die with a fever of 102. The boy replies that the boys in a school in France told him that one cannot live with 44 degrees. The exasperated father quickly explains to his son about the difference between Fahrenheit and Celsius thermometers. He compares them to miles and kilometers. The boy slowly relaxes, and by the next day he cries very easily at little things. This open ending leaves the readers with an assumption that the shock of the previous day’s experiences resulted in short temper.