“I wonder what he did?” Nick said.
“Double-crossed somebody. That’s what they kill them for.”
“I’m going to get out of this town,” Nick said.
“Yes,” said George. “That’s a good thing to do.”
“I can’t stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he’s going to get it. It’s too damned awful.”
“Well,” said George, “you better not think about it.”
Upon first glance, a reader might think that this group of quotes is located in the middle of Ernest Hemingway’s short story, The Killers, a tale about two men who come into a diner with plans to kill another man named Ole Anderson. The story starts off as the two men, Max and Al, argued with George, the owner of the diner, about whether or not they can have “…a roast pork tenderloin with apple sauce and mashed potatoes.” A young man by the name of Nick Adams is sitting at the end of the counter, staying out of their issues, but he gets dragged in anyway. Picture a modern-day hostage situation at a bank or somewhere similar to that, and you’ve got the setting of what’s going on in George’s diner. Nick and the cook, Sam, are tied up in the kitchen, and George is forced to lie to customers that Sam is out running an errand or sick. This creates discontent among the diner patrons, especially this man:
In the five minutes a man came in, and George explained that the cook was sick.
“Why the hell don’t you get another cook?” the man asked. “Aren’t you running a lunch-counter?” He went out.
Max and Al probably put this plan into action in anticipation of Ole Anderson entering the diner and meeting his death. They could shoot him freely and wouldn’t have to worry about any stray witnesses. When Ole Anderson never showed up, his assassins left the diner, and Nick was chosen to go and warn Anderson about the two men after him. When Nick approaches him about the subject, he is apathetic about the situation–similar to the other characters in the story, as well–and simply thanks Nick for coming by, not wanting to know anything about the people hunting him.
The Killers is a perfect example of modernistic literature’s fascination with open endings because of the quote at the beginning of the blog. It seems like it would fit snugly into the middle of a story, but Hemingway decided that was that, he was done. The ending is extremely vague and left open to interpretation. Did Ole Anderson end up being killed by Max and Al? Maybe he ended up having a change of heart and fled the area, desperate to live. It’s like a multiple choice question with no wrong answer. The idea of open endings prevailing over closed ones was revolutionary back in the time of modernism’s introduction to the world because readers were challenged. Their opinions mattered, they got a new state of independence; they didn’t need an author to decide the ending of something for them.
