Ernest Hemingway is a persona that lives on the page separate from the man himself.  

Hemingway’s “A Day’s Wait” treats the sickness of a child with more than a touch of irony.  While the child, whom the father refers to as “Schatz” (a German term of endearment), attempts to understand his illness, he adopts an exaggerated view of his illness, which the narrator (the father) pokes fun at by stating in deadpan that the boy believes he will die.  If the tone of the short story might make the reader think it is indeed a grave illness, we are (probably) disabused of this and led to believe that he will in fact be ok.   

The boy ingenuously asks his father: 

“About how long will it be before I die?” (p 35). 

The father reassures the boy he isn’t going to die–though he does have a temperature of 102, which is not nothing.  

Later the narrator explains: 

“He had been waiting all day to die, ever since nine o’clock in the morning.” (p. 36) 

The father indulges his son’s exaggerated sense of his own illness while reassuring him.  It is this fatherly patience, the father as the fount of reason and logic, which makes “A Day’s Wait” a sweet, if brief, short story from Hemingway. 

Works Cited 

Hemingway, Ernest. The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories. NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955. 

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