Structure

The story “A Day’s Wait” by Ernest Hemingway is structured into three scenes. The first and the third take place in the boy’s room, while the second one takes places in the woods, in the countryside. The second scene actually functions as a separation between the other two. In the first scene, readers are kept in the dark as to why the child is so tensed because of a simple influenza. In the third scene, both the readers and the father finally find out why the boy acted so strange – he believed he was going to die because of misinterpreting his temperature level.

Point of view and narrator

The story is a first-person narration. The narrator is the father of the protagonist, the nine-year old boy called Schatz. Though the narrator is unnamed, some critics say the father is a semi-autobiographical character who appears in many other short stories of the author, called Nick Adams. 

The story is written using the point of view of an observer. The father is the mature observer of Schatz’s behavior while he is sick. He has limited knowledge ...