A Very Short Story

“A Very Short Story” is one of Ernest Hemingway’s earliest literary works. It originally appeared as one of 18 vignettes that made up the chapbook in our time, published in 1924. The story was later republished, along with the original vignettes and 14 additional short stories, in a new and expanded edition of In Our Time in 1925. This guide refers to that later edition.

“A Very Short Story” is semi-autobiographical, based loosely upon Hemingway’s own experiences as a soldier during World War I. It explores such themes as love and loss, wartime romance, and coming of age. The title of the work presages the extreme brevity of the story and the style, which achieves an extreme economy of language and leaves many details and character motivations up to the interpretation of the reader. Like the unnamed protagonist of the story, Hemingway himself suffered an injury—to his leg—while serving on the Italian front during World War I. Subsequently, while recovering in an army hospital, he had a brief and passionate, but ultimately failed, love affair with a nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky. He revisited this affair in literary form later in his career in the novel A Farewell to Arms and the short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

“A Very Short Story” is set during World War I, and the action initially takes place in a military hospital in the Northern Italian city of Padua, situated in the foothills of the Italian Alps, roughly equidistant between Verona and Venice. The protagonist is an American soldier who is admitted to the hospital with an unknown injury that requires surgery. He begins a passionate love affair with his nurse, Luz. The text does not reveal how the relationship began, only that “it”—as the relationship is cryptically referred to—is known and tolerated by everyone at the hospital. Upon the soldier’s recovery, he is set to return to the front. While he and Luz want “to get married […] and felt as though they were married” (Paragraph 3), the logistics of the formal paperwork required for marriage delays their plans. The soldier returns to combat, and Luz writes him frequently about “how much she loved him and how it was impossible to get along with him” (Paragraph 4). Due to the war, the soldier receives Luz’s letters only after the armistice—the peace that concludes the war.

Their love appears to have survived the war, but while marriage is still the couple’s goal, there are now other obstacles standing in the way. Some of these are practical and geographical in nature. The soldier is American, and though Luz’s nationality is never specified, she is at least working and living in Italy. A move to America would be a major commitment for her, and with the war over, the soldier’s financial prospects are uncertain. The couple agrees, therefore, that the soldier should get a job before she comes to join him in New York; other causes for delay hint at the soldier’s drinking and personal instability back home: “It was understood that he would not drink, and he did not want to see his friends or anyone in the States” (Paragraph 5). However, Luz may be the one driving the delay of marriage, as they quarrel “about her not being willing to come home at once” (Paragraph 5). They say goodbye to each other in Milan in the midst of an argument, and the soldier feels “sick about saying good-bye like that” (Paragraph 5).

Their relationship reached a romantic peak when they were together in the hospital and flourished even when the soldier had to return to war, but the reality of their physical distance is reflected in a diminished intimacy. The soldier sails back to the states from Genoa, and Luz goes to the small Northern Italian town of Pordonone (Pordenone) “to open a hospital” (Paragraph 6). A battalion of arditi—elite Italian shock troops—is quartered there. The narrator notes the dreary and lonely atmosphere of the town in winter, setting the stage for Luz’s infidelity, which is stated in Hemingway’s signature matter-of-fact style: “[T]he major of the battalion made love to Luz” (Paragraph 6). She writes to the soldier to confess and asks his forgiveness, but she also belittles their relationship, writing that it “had only been a boy and girl affair” (Paragraph 6). She adds that she expects to be married to the major in the spring. This marriage never materializes, and the soldier never replies to the letter. Instead, the story ends abruptly with a revelation that he “contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl […] while riding a taxicab through Lincoln Park” (Paragraph 7).