Setting

As the short story “The Three-Day Blow” by Ernest Hemingway is semi-autobiographical, we can assume the events are set sometime around or before 1920, when Hemingway was a young man. The action takes place on a windy autumn day, at a cottage near Lake Michigan, as indicated by the references to the town Charlevoix (l. 115).

Physical setting

The physical setting includes Bill’s father’s cottage and the surrounding area with its orchard and forest: “THE RAIN STOPPED AS NICK TURNED INTO the road that went up through the orchard. The fruit had been picked and the fall wind blew through the bare trees.” (ll. 1-2);

There was the cottage, the porch bare, smoke coming from the chimney. In back was the garage, the chicken coop and the second-growth timber like a hedge against the woods behind. The big trees swayed far over in the wind as he watched. (ll. 5-8)

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Social setting

Bill and Nick are two teenage friends who try to act as adults but still have childish, competitive attitudes. They drink and want to get drunk because this is what men do, but they do so competitively, each trying to hide from the other his state of drunkenness.

Some of their concerns are typically male, as they talk about baseball, fishing, and hunting. Tthe fact that they imagine going fishing with their favorite authors is another sign that they are still childish.

Furthermore, they talk about their fathers and not their mothers, which illustrates that they are focused on achieving an ideal of manhood.

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