Ernest Hemingway’s “The End of Something” doesn’t say exactly what the something was. This is a Nick Adams story, and Nick and Marjorie were going out. We’d probably say this is about the end of their relationship, although that word is vague. Nick was a war-damaged veteran, and it’s to say what was in his heart.
I’d read the story without seeing another relationship. The story begins:
In the old days Hortons Bay was a lumbering town. No one who lived in it was out of sound of the big saws in the mill by the lake. Then one year there were no more logs to make lumber.
When the loggers cut all the trees, workers came and carried off the machinery that made the mill, and without the mill Horton’s Bay ceased to be a town.
It takes something to have something that endures. You can’t have a long-lasting mill town if your idea of a relationship with the forest is exploitive. You could say something similar about relationships with other people.
• Source: “The End of Something” is in Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises & Other Writings 1918–1926; Library of America, 2020, pp. 173–76. It’s here:
https://www.loa.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Hemingway-End-of-Somethingl.pdf
I’m thinking about it because it was The Library of America’s “Story of the Week.”
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