Characterizations

The main characters in the story “A Day’s Wait” by Ernest Hemingway are the young boy Schatz and the father-narrator. The two characters are built in an antithetical way. While the child is going through an inner torment, taking his flu very dramatically because he assumed he was going to die, the father is very detached, ignorant of the child’s concerns.

Schatz

Schatz is a nine-year-old boy, who gets the flu, or influenza, and undergoes an inner crisis as he believes he is going to die of high-fever. Though the characters live in America now, they have also lived in France where the boy learned that “you can’t live with forty-four degrees” (p. 142, ll. 3-4). This suggests the boy is educated, yet still a naive child, as he does not understand the difference between Celsius and Fahrenheit. His confusion leads him to believe that he is going to die.

Schatz is a very representative character for Hemingway’s style. Many of the author’s literary characters are fatalistic heroes, people who take everything dramatica...