Ernest Hemingway's “A Day's Wait” is about a boy who thinks he is dying. He has really just misunderstood the meaning of his 102 degree fever, but for a full day he lives with the premise that he will soon die.

Your question is a good one. Hemingway was never one to over-explain things, so when we hear the narrator describing his hunting excursion of a few hours while his son is at home with a mild case of the flu, but thinking he is dying (unbeknownst to the father), we can't help but wonder what Hemingway is up to.

One possibility is that Hemingway wants to juxtapose the father's relatively trivial activity and pleasure with the turmoil that the boy must be going through. Does the boy know his father has gone hunting while he is in the process of dying (at least in his own mind)? Hemingway doesn't tell us if the boy knows or not.

Another possibility is that Hemingway wants to make a point of how we go through our days doing things that don't really amount to much, when we all have such a momentous event in our future—our own death, still ahead of us.

Perhaps Hemingway just wanting to give his story a buffer between the two key moments in the story: the boy's misunderstanding, followed by his father's explanation. This gives the reader some time to subconsciously reflect on what must be going on in the boy's mind. Then, when the father tells him what's really happening, we feel a sense of compassion for the boy, who had to struggle through all that time thinking he was dying.