Let's start in the middle to answer this question about "A Day's Wait." In the last line the father and narrator says, "The hold over himself relaxed ...." This refers to an earlier passage:
'Your temperature is all right,' I said. It's nothing to worry about.'
'I don't worry,' he said, 'but I can't keep from thinking.'
'Don't think,' I said. 'Just take it easy.'
'I'm taking it easy,' he said and looked straight ahead. He was evidently holding tight onto himself about something.
The word "hold" refers to the emotional restraint the boy was bravely exerting in the face of (as he believed) advancing death. He was holding in fear, worry, perhaps panic; he was holding his dignity and self-control together. Therefore in the last line, the hold that relaxes is the hold of self-restraint in the face of humanity's greatest fear and darkest voyage.
The line...
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preceding the last line is also important. It states that the boy's fixed "gaze" at the foot of his bed "slowly relaxed." This indicates that he was letting go of his courageous determination as the news sank in and he made the mental adjustment to the idea that death would not be his immediate fate.
The meaning of the last sentence will now be a easier to get at:
The hold over himself relaxed too, finally, and the next day it was very slack and he cried very easily at little things that were of no importance.
We already understand the "hold" that relaxed was his courageous determination to die with grace and not be hysterical about his fate. The next day, his nerves were spent from the effort and equally from the relief. It happens very often in life that when courage calls for self-control in the face of great matters, a happy or beneficial resolution will release a flood of tears of relief: once the need for great courage and strength is past, the nerves unravel and the depth of the fear or worry or pain roll to the surface. This is what the boy--very naturally and authentically--experienced: the relief that showed the depth of his struggle through unprovoked tears.
In Hemingway's "A Day's Wait," what does the last paragraph suggest about the incident?
In Ernest Hemingway's short story "A Day's Wait," the last paragraph suggests that the boy is very young and must have been under considerable emotional strain from waiting all day to die. The last paragraph reads:
But his gaze at the foot of the bed relaxed slowly. The hold over himself relaxed too, finally, and the next day it was very slack and he cried very easily, at little things that were of no importance.
Hemingway does not bother to explain the location of the incident, since he assumes the reader will understand this from the fact that the boy believes his fever is fantastically high. He does not know anything about the difference between Fahrenheit and Celsius, which his father tries to explain to him. His son assumed that his temperature had been taken with a Fahrenheit thermometer, whereas it had to be taken with a Celsius thermometer because they are in Europe, probably either in Spain or France, the European settings Hemingway used most frequently. Father and son are presumably Americans. If the boy's fever had been 102 degrees Celsius, it would have been well over 200 degrees Fahrenheit, an impossibly high temperature which only a little boy could imagine.Â
Hemingway valued courage very highly, as many of his short stories and novels clearly show. This obviously autobiographical story shows how the author admired the courage his little boy displayed when he thought he was sure to die.