The Killers | Hemingway’s “The Killers”

In the following essay, Quentin E. Martina relates “The Killers” to breakthroughs in physics happening at the time of the story’s creation.

‘‘The Killers’’ can be seen as a concise and dramatic representation of certain aspects of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and Werner Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy (or uncertainty). In general and simplified terms, relativity argues that time and mass are relative, not absolute, measurements, and that therefore seemingly fixed things, such as the motion of clocks and the shape of tables, are in fact dependent on their actual motion (as through space) and the perspective of the viewer. Lincoln Barnett explains that ‘‘there is no such thing as a fixed...

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