[This essay was originally published in 1943.]

[In addition to the structure of "The Killers," as it concerns the relations among incidents and with regard to the attitudes of the characters,] there remain as important questions such items as the following: What is Hemingway's attitude toward his material? How does this attitude find its expression?

Perhaps the simplest approach to these questions may be through a consideration of the situations and characters which interest Hemingway. These situations are usually violent ones: the hard-drinking and sexually promiscuous world of The Sun Also Rises; the chaotic and brutal world of war as in A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, or "A Way You'll Never Be"; the dangerous and exciting world of the bull ring or the prize ring as in The Sun Also Rises, Death in the Afternoon, "The Undefeated," "Fifty Grand"; the world of crime, as in...