The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, a short story by Ernest Hemingway can be viewed thematically as the last phase of the initiation of the code hero, a phase whose echoes are heard in The Snows of Kilimanjaro and, in one form or another, in For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea.

The at-first cowardly Francis Macomber and his symbolically castrating wife are being guided on a big-game hunt by a professional hunter and code initiate, Robert Wilson. Macomber repeatedly shows his cowardice and is verbally chastised by his wife, who sarcastically responds to his assertiveness late in the story with the line, "You've gotten awfully brave, awfully suddenly." Ironically, Macomber has, in fact, become brave, as he demonstrates by standing his ground and firing at a charging buffalo, "shooting a touch high each time and hitting the heavy horns, splintering and chipping them like hitting a slate roof...." Margot grabs a gun, ostensibly to get the buffalo, and shoots Macomber through the skull.

The literal reader will find a number of questions about this story, at the level of plot, nagging. Why does Macomber, if he is a coward, go on a big-game hunt in the first place? Why does he, when in the company of Wilson, allow his wife to badger him? Of what is he actually afraid and how does he overcome his fear? Finally, does his wife shoot him intentionally? None of the questions are answered explicitly in the story, and yet the reader familiar with Hemingway's aesthetic theories can make good guesses at the answers. Moreover, he knows that the unstated answers tell what the story is really about. Macomber, although a coward, goes on a big-game hunt because of his craving to break free of the oppressive forces, represented by his wife, which bind him. Perhaps the fear is, on one level, of castration; perhaps on another, it is a fear of being forever bound to woman, a condition which keeps his identity as a male and as an individual in eclipse. On the deepest level, as the text of the story indicates, it is a fear of death, which because of the heroic Wilson's presence and with his guidance, Macomber overcomes. The title of the story suggest that every moment Macomber lived in fear was not actually life at all; only in overcoming the fear of death did he escape the suffocating attachment to Margot and actually have a life, although the life was only of a few seconds' duration. Whether Margot shot Macomber intentionally or not makes little difference, because when the code hero embraces death, that, for him, is the end of the story.

With Francis Macomber the code hero finally reaches the point of full initiation toward which he has been moving since the early Nick Adams stories. In his first form, as in "Indian Camp," the hero becomes dimly aware of the central dilemma of life: to face his own mortality. Once he accepts this call to adventure, he begins his pursuit of experiences which will reveal to him, at least symbolically, the truth that in life, death is always present. It becomes the hero's task to accept it stoically. Seeing death, calling it by various names like nada or nothingness, empathizing with those who are close to it like the old man in the cafe--it remains only for the code hero to grasp the thing itself. When he does, as Francis Macomber does, embrace death without fear, the cycle is complete; the initiation is accomplished.