Ham and Eggs and Hermeneutics: Re-reading Hemingway’s “The Killers”

Hemingway’s short stories have often been read through the aesthetic model of the iceberg, but the practice of omission has proved an obstacle to interpreting one of his most celebrated and supposedly exemplary texts, “The Killers.” In particular, dominant realist readings of “The Killers” as a story of Chicago gangsters and the adolescent Nick Adams’s moral education have failed to recognize the text’s deep internal contradictions and absurdities, which point toward its secret representation of an entirely different scene of psychic and historical reality. Circumstantial but compelling archival evidence supports a radical re-reading of Hemingway’s classic story based not on things left out but on things cryptically inscribed on the surface of the text in the form of the rebus. When deciphered, the text’s secret inscriptions locate the “other” scene of “The Killers” in Hemingway’s experience in World War I, and identify the text as a remarkable experiment in modernist form.