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To raise the Code Hero to something like tragic dignity, there had to be the risk of death. From Fossalta on, Hemingway had death as an obsession; the bullfight gave it to him esthetically, as a ritual, with order and discipline. In Death in the Afternoon, he states his tragic creed flatly: "There is no remedy for anything in life." His Winner Takes Nothing; his lovers lose all. His fictional stages are strewn with corpses. In To Have and Have Not, there are twelve, which compares favorably with the Elizabethans. Nemesis, in the Hemingway tragedy, is bad luck. "I was going good," says Manuel, the gored bullfighter in The Undefeated, "I didn't have any luck. That was all." "Never fight under me," says Colonel Cantwell in Across the River and Into the Trees. "I'm cagey. But I'm not lucky." Even Santiago, the old fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea, says, "I have no luck any more." Under the brilliant physical surface in Hemingway there was always the metaphysical brooding, the glancing reflections on a destiny his characters keep telling themselves not to think about.
What does not bear thinking about is what is going to happen. A Hemingway character does not make things happen; things happen to him. Hemingway's people often seem like masochistic spectators of their own doom. In The Killers, Nick Adams rushes to the boardinghouse room of the ex-prizefighter Ole Andreson to warn him that two gangsters are in town to kill him. "There isn't anything I can do about it," says Ole Andreson. lying on his bed and turning his face fatalistically to the wall. There isn't anything any Hemingway character can do about his fate except to take it.
Infantry of the Mind. The trouble with the metaphysics of chance is that it is too shallow for a true tragic destiny. Unlike the Greek and Elizabethan heroes, the Hemingway hero does not understand his fate. It's simply a dirty trick.
The reader, in turn, is saddened without being purged, resigned without being reconciled to man's destiny.
Whatever Hemingway's merits or demerits as a thinker, he had the greatest technical command of English of any modern writer except Joyce. He performed a major operation on the English sentence. He cut out the adjectives and prompting words that tell a reader how to feel and replaced them with spare, brisk monosyllables that he called the "ugly short infantry of the mind." Hemingway spliced his images together like a film editor, so that the action was always advancing on the reader rather than the reader following the action.
In For Whom the Bell Tolls, El Sordo on the hilltop is waiting to squeeze the trigger on an enemy, but it is the reader who sights along the rifle: "Look. With a red face and blond hair and blue eyes. With no cap and his moustache is yellow. With blue eyes. With pale blue eyes. With pale blue eyes with something wrong with them. With pale blue eyes that don't focus. Close enough. Too close. Yes, Comrade Voyager. Take it, Comrade Voyager."